Memoirs of a Crimefighter Read online

  Memoirs of a Crimefighter

  Written by Seth Andrew Jacob

  DISCLAIMER:

  No secret identities are revealed in these memoirs. Any first names given are false ones created for this text. The content of these memoirs is not intended to libel any superhero, supervillain, or superhuman, living or dead.

  Chapter 1: Spandex Wasteland

  The night that I found out my father died started out like any other night. I had just finished a routine patrol with my superhero team, The Millenials. Well, we called it a “patrol”, that’s not really the right word for it. It’s more like the alcohol and drug fueled antics of people in their twenties on a Saturday night, except with a liberal dose of superpowers thrown into the mix. There’s no law against flying under the influence, but there probably should be.

  As we walked into The Domino Mask, the DJ was playing a weird remix of the theme from the Superb 6 cartoon show, and the dance floor was packed. I pushed through throngs of inebriated superheroes to get to the bar. Ex-sidekicks let off the built up steam of a repressed youth by drinking a lot more than they probably should. Some obvious spandex tourists who had no powers or superhero careers danced in clusters of expensive, impractical costumes. Elastic, gyrating limbs stretched to the pounding beat and entwined their way through the dance floor. Red heat vision eyes pulsated rhythmically and gave off waves of warmth, and capes fluttered as dancers ascended above the crowd.

  I made my way to the bar and struggled to get the busy bartender’s attention. Joe Metal sat down on the bar stool next to me with a resounding clang. One of my teammates, Joe Metal was known for his state of the art exoskeleton armor. He didn’t actually have any superpowers, but he designed and built his suit of sleek, highly advanced armor from scratch.

  “Hey, Spectacle. The video of the Master Boson fight’s already got like a couple thousand views,” Joe gave me a look that all but screamed Told you so as he leaned over the bar and grabbed a couple of glasses for us.

  “Not this again, Joe.” Joe Metal’s armor recorded all of our fights with supervillains, and he uploaded the footage to YouTube religiously. We made a lot of money from the ad revenue on these videos. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a superhero, it’s that the internet loves a good super-brawl.

  However, the vast majority of the money that The Millenials makes comes from collecting rewards for taking out buffoons like this Master Boson guy, a ninja wannabe with low level nuclear powers that we caught trying to rob a liquor store earlier that night. The superhero-industrial complex works like this: it’s cheaper for the government to just pay us to handle these maniacs than it is to try to police, register, and regulate the hordes of costumed narcissists calling themselves superheroes. Why spend billions of dollars per year trying to arrest superpowered vigilantes when you can pay us to take care of superpowered criminals at a fraction of the cost?

  Joe flicked his wrist, and a spigot jutted out of his armor. He aimed it at each of the glasses and copious amounts of vodka streamed out.

  “Just hear me out, bro. We’ve had a decent amount of success by taking advantage of social media. Isn’t it time we took it to the next level?” Joe downed his glass in one quick motion.

  “I’ve heard it all before, Joe…I’m all for the social media stuff, you know that. I just don’t want to go as far with it as you do.” I smelled the glass of vodka Joe poured for me and then took a sip. I couldn’t help but be skeptical of liquor contained in the same exoskeleton that had multiple uranium reactors.

  Joe shot some vodka into our teammate Insight’s glass while she took a selfie with our other teammate, Mr. Mercurial. Her forehead pulsed with purple telekinetic energy as she levitated her phone in the air in front of her with her mind, and you could tell that she was going out of her way to radiate a little more light than necessary for the benefit of the camera. She had just redesigned her costume, and she was showing off her new modern hippy meets superhero style.

  She had her arm around Mr. Mercurial, whose entire body was made up of silvery flowing fluid. Mr. Mercurial stretched his chrome smile wider than humanly possible, and his metallic, mirror-like eyes bugged out of his head like he was a living cartoon. It was blatantly obvious as they kept taking pictures that Insight and Mr. Mercurial were deliberately staying out of this conversation. They had heard it all before.

  “Spectacle, it’s inevitable. Sooner or later, everyone is going to be doing what I do. Everyone will be live streaming every waking moment of their lives,” Joe pointed the spigot in his wrist at his glass and filled it up again. His eyes flitted back and forth as he poured. He was reading text that his armor fed into his optic nerves, probably tweets or texts or tumblr posts. Joe was constantly immersed in the stream. Sometimes it was hard to draw a line where Joe ended and the internet began.

  “Alright, fine, Joe. Let’s say everyone starts live streaming everything all the time. What about privacy? What about these little things called secret identities? Maybe you’ve heard of them?”

  “Come on, Spectacle. Don’t be such a rube. The world is growing more and more connected every day, and it’s the people who cultivate a familiar, relatable online persona who rise above the noise,” Joe held his glass up as if he was making a toast.

  “Secret identities are going extinct. Privacy is dead. Long live the social media superhero!” Joe laughed as he drank from his glass. A drop of vodka rolled down his chin and landed on the titanium collar of his armor.

  “Sounds to me like you’re getting ambitious, Joe. Remember when we started The Millennials? Remember what we agreed on?”

  “Of course I remember, it’s not about that, it’s just—”

  “I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, but I’d really like to hear you say it,” I said. To be honest, I was definitely being a dick. Joe looked down at his glass and sloshed the liquid around in it. The excitement had drained from him.

  “No archenemies,” Joe answered sullenly.

  “That’s right. No archenemies. We never wanted The Millenials to be the next Superb 6. We never wanted to have to deal with insanely powerful assholes obsessed with killing us because daddy never gave them enough hugs.” I drained my glass and held it out for Joe to refill while I made my point.

  “Ambitious moves like the one you’re talking about put more eyes on us. It gets us more attention, and that’s the opposite of what we want. We want to be under the radar, Joe.” My phone started buzzing in my pocket while I was talking, but I let it ring a few more times so that I could finish my argument.

  “We don’t want to be a major league superhero team because being in the major leagues gets you killed. I don’t know about you, but I’m happy fighting low level hacks and making decent money. I don’t need a bunch of psychotic, absurdly powerful bastards getting all infatuated with the idea of being my ‘archenemy’.” I pulled out my vibrating phone, and Joe’s eyes went back to scanning the invisible text in front of him while I took the call.

  He was retreating to the stream for the moment, but I knew that this discussion wasn’t over. Joe was always getting excited about these ideas he had about the future of superheroes. He would become almost manic about his latest internet marketing scheme to break into the upper ranks of the crimefighting community, but he usually got distracted and moved onto the next idea before he could follow through with the first one.

  I answered the call from the number I didn’t recognize, and I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. The man on the phone told me something that I wasn’t prepared to hear, and the thumping music in the bar faded to a drone like I was listening to it under water.

  “Yes. I understand. I’ll be there…thank you, of course.” I hung
up, and my phone slipped out of my hand and landed on the bar with a slap.

  “Hey…whoa, are you okay man?” Mr. Mercurial sat down next to me at the bar while I was on the phone and I hadn’t even noticed. His silvery brow wrinkled with concern.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. That was nothing.” Of course, I was lying to Mr. Mercurial, and probably to myself too. I was anything but fine. The man on the phone was my father’s lawyer, and he just informed me that my father had died of a drug overdose.

  The rest of that night is a blur. Immediately after the call from my father’s lawyer, I began to drink with the reckless abandon characteristic of a person trying to obliterate any discernible memory of themselves or their problems. It’s easy to say in hindsight that I was making the worst decision in that situation, but at the time it felt like a pretty good idea.

  I have smears of memory from that night. I remember Mr. Mercurial trying out bits from his stand up comedy routine on us, and I remember laughing at his jokes much harder than they deserved to be laughed at. I remember being outside of the Domino Mask and smoking a cigarette with Insight. Insight looked at me with that purple telepathic gleam in her eye that she gets when she’s receiving strong mental vibes from someone, and she asked me if everything was alright. I remember lying to her and taking another drink while forcing my jumbled, drunken thoughts on something else, anything else. I remember Joe Metal taking a lot of pictures of us, pictures that later showed up online, and I remember faking an unconvincing look of happiness. I remember bits and pieces of a conversation I had with Insight about the philosophy of superheroes and what she called “superhuman consciousness” while she took drops of SUHP. I remember a spiraling feeling as I stumbled home to my apartment, like my world had spun out of orbit and the sun was drifting farther and farther away from me.

  I woke up feeling like a nuclear bomb had gone off inside my skull. I could barely think, and my phone was blaring an alarm. For a few seconds, I wondered which one of my asshole teammates set the alarm on my phone to mess with me, and then it came back to me. I set the alarm because I had agreed to meet with my father’s lawyer.

  About thirty minutes, one thoroughly unpleasant vomiting session, and approximately a gallon of water later, I was sitting in front of my father’s lawyer. His office was a cramped and musty room filled with stacks of paper. He was a nice, middle aged man who had a touch of a hoarding problem.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said, and his eyes were filled with a deep well of genuine sympathy.

  “What happened exactly?”

  “Well…I’m sure you’ve heard of soup? Your father had a bit of a soup habit, and I’m afraid an older man’s heart can only take so much soup…again, I’m so sorry.”

  Soup, or SUHP, is Synthetic Ultra Human Potentiator. It’s a drug used by many superheroes and supervillains that temporarily induces a euphoric high, mild hallucinations, and increased superhuman abilities in the user. I had no idea that my father, who I thought was a stock broker, had ever used it in his life.

  “My father…was a souphead? Since when?”

  He was taken aback. He looked at me as if the circumstances of the discussion had just radically changed. He just realized that we weren’t on the same page. We weren’t even in the same book.

  “Look…son…I don’t know exactly how to tell you this. Have you spoken to your mother recently?”

  “She died in a car crash when I was very young. So no, no I haven’t spoken to her recently.”

  “I’m sorry…I wasn’t aware of that. I always had the sense that your father wasn’t the, ah, sharing type but…anyway. I had an idea that your father wasn’t close with you when I was listed as his emergency contact and the hospital called me, I thought, well, you know…but…this is…I mean…”

  “Just tell me.”

  The lawyer got up from behind the desk, and he walked over to me. He took a deep breath, resting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Your father was a costumed crimefighter. Have you ever heard of Jack Titan?”

  I chuckled. My head felt like it was going to explode with the pressure of the headache I had, I thought I might throw up again, and I was little bit offended by the lawyer’s joke, but still, I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

  “Son…I know this isn’t easy to wrap your head around…” He cleared his throat.

  “Wait, hold on a second. You’re seriously telling me that my father was a superhero?”

  “…masked vigilantes need legal counsel more than you would think. You’d be surprised how many frivolous super-criminal law suits superheroes have on their plate. Supervillains are constantly suing for assault, hospital bills, even emotional damage. Supervillains are notoriously litigious.”

  My father was a stock broker, or rather, he always told me that he was a stock broker. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I was one of the few people that he trusted with his secret…God, I’m so sorry, he should have been the one to tell you this…”

  The cluttered office whirled around me. I almost passed out. This was all too much to handle.

  “I know this must be an incredibly difficult time for you, and you, ah, honestly, I understand you had a late night. We have a lot of things to discuss…your father left everything to you, his apartment, his money, and his, uh, crimefighting paraphernalia. Get some rest, okay?”

  I stood up and walked out of the lawyer’s office. I was flying on autopilot as I got out of there. My body made its way past his secretary, to the elevator, and out of the building, but I wasn’t there. The overpowering shock had shut me down. I never had a close relationship with my father, but I thought I had some vague idea of who he was. Now he was dead, and he lived a secret life as a superhero that I never knew about, that I would never know. And on top of that, I was living the same secret life, and he would never know either. I collapsed to the street outside of the building and vomited for a second time.

  There’s only so much a superhuman constitution can take.

  Chapter 2: A Portrait of the Superhero as a Young Man

  The night that my superpowers manifested was one of the best nights of my life. I was seventeen years old, stuck in an all-boys boarding school in the dead of winter, and bored out of my mind. A friend of mine on the track team had smuggled a stash of SUHP into school. He was using it to improve his 100 meter dash times and get an edge over other teams at track meets, but I had a different use in mind.

  I managed to sneak out of the dorm after lights out without being noticed. Hundreds of acres of forest surrounded the school, and I took a vial of soup with me into the white, snowy woods so I could experiment with a little privacy. I can still remember crunching my way through the snow in the immersive silence of the night. I could barely see where I was going in the darkness, and the small flashlight I had didn’t help much. When you’re in a boarding school, alone time is a precious commodity, and the isolation of the forest made me feel like I had just found an endless supply of that resource. It was refreshing.

  I strayed off of the path and trod through the snow for a while, deeper and deeper into the trees, until I felt comfortable that there was no chance of being spotted. If a student was found out of the dorm after lights out and wandering out into the woods by himself to do illegal drugs, it was guaranteed that you would be expelled, and probably sent to some sort of reform school. Still, I have to admit that the threat of getting caught only added to the excitement.

  I brushed the snow off of a fallen tree and sat down on the log. Just for a moment, I appreciated the scenery. Being alone in the middle of a snow covered forest is almost like being on another planet. You’re all bundled up in winter gear like an astronaut in a space suit, all you can hear is the sound of your own breath, each footprint leaves a mark in the territory that might be discovered by some other explorer. It’s a landscape that is simultaneously harsh and stunningly beautiful, and I felt like I was millions of miles from civilization.

  I took the small vi
al of soup out of my jacket pocket. I shook the little plastic bottle and watched the clear liquid slosh around. It struck me as so strange that this stuff was responsible for so much radical change in society. SUHP was first created in 1938 by scientists who were trying to come up with medically useful compounds, and instead, they accidentally created a drug that temporarily unlocks superhuman potential in the DNA of ordinary people. I read somewhere that the first scientist who took soup accidentally spilled a huge dose on himself, and he thought he was having a stroke when he started smelling ultrasonic frequencies and seeing gamma rays.

  It wasn’t until the Harvard SUHP Project in the 60’s that they discovered that SUHP activates dormant sequences of genes within the vast stretches of junk DNA in the human genome. In most people, SUHP temporarily switches on genes that will give them a random set of mild superpowers for a few hours as well as a euphoric high and hallucinations…but a small percentage of the population has a genetic predisposition to having those genes stay on permanently. The superhero boom of the 60’s was partially because of the growing legions of soupheads as the drug gained popularity, but it was also because a tiny fraction of those millions of SUHP users unlocked extraordinary genetic potential that transformed them forever.

  I had no reason to think that I had any superhuman potential lurking in my gene pool as I opened the vial and drank the soup. I had no idea that my father was one of the participants of the Harvard SUHP project decades before I was born, and that the drug released superhuman potential within him that sparked his superhero career as “Jack Titan, Man of Myth.” I sat there somewhat skeptically as I waited for the stuff to start working, completely unaware that I was about to experience the genetic equivalent of being struck by lightning.

  I was starting to think that my friend ripped me off and I was about to walk back to the dorm when it hit me. It was like the snow painted forest was suddenly on fire, burning with cool white flames that danced on every naked branch and pale green fir. Everything looked like I had been seeing it on a low resolution, black and white TV for my entire life and I didn’t even know it. Now, that old bulky box had been replaced by a crystal clear HD TV with radiant colors. More than that, I felt strong, impossibly strong, like my muscles were tightly coiled titanium springs just waiting to explode into action.