Only I Can Save the Multiverse… Again
Jane and I headed to my car that was, thankfully, parked in the parking garage across the street and wasn’t destroyed by the fire that had eradicated my place of business. Jane was, of course, impressed by my replacement for the Merciless Mobile.
“This is your car? What are you, having a midlife crisis? Did you die and become replaced by Tom Selleck?” Jane asked, looking at the 1965 Blue Corvette I owned. I called it the Blue Meanie.
“No, I don’t have a mustache,” I replied. “This was a gift from Cindy’s dad to her. I’m just driving it around.”
“She lets you?” Jane asked. “I thought she’d watch the odometer like Ferris Bueller’s dad.”
“It was his best friend’s dad,” I replied. “That movie taught me the value of slacking off and disobeying authority.”
Jane shook her head and slid into the passenger’s seat. “Well, it’s still a weird car to drive if you’re avoiding attention.”
“I’m a superhero now, I don’t need to avoid attention,” I replied, turning insubstantial and sliding through the door into the driver’s seat. Across the street the fire department was finally arriving to put out the ashes that were the sole remains of my building. I didn’t have much attachment to the building, but I felt there was something symbolic about this.
David flopped himself in the back. “Plenty of superheroes and supervillains have switched teams over the years, Gary. The majority of heel-face turns don’t end up sticking. Larceny Lass tried being a hero a dozen times because she was in love with the Nightwalker. In the end, she always ended up going back to being a thief.”
“Maybe that’s because switching sides for a guy is stupid,” Jane replied, buckling her seatbelt.
“I always thought Larceny Lass was playing the long game,” I replied. “Being a beautiful Eartha Kitt type, you pretend you’re not so bad. Then they try to save you and you get away with murder. Because they can tell themselves that they’re trying to do the right thing by you rather than just being in deep lust.”
“Is that what you did with Ultragoddess?” Jane asked.
I stared at her, narrowing my eyes. “No.”
Jane shrugged. “No skin off my back if you are. My boyfriend is a crime lord. That doesn’t prevent me from being the protector of my hometown against evil spirits.”
“So, you do have superheroes in your world,” I said, starting the car and driving off into the morning mist. The police didn’t even try to stop us.
“No,” Jane said. “This is completely different. We don’t wear costumes or have codenames.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “You just use your superpowers to fight evil.”
Jane flipped me the bird and I just laughed. “So what happened to the Merciless Mobile?”
“I donated it to the Nightwalker Museum,” I said. “That and my sister stopped buying me replacements whenever I wrecked one. It turns out that maybe you should leave the autopilot on when you’re piloting a land vehicle with a jet engine.”
“It’s amazing that you haven’t killed more innocent people,” Jane said.
“I’m just lucky that way,” I replied. “Mostly I just maim and cripple them. However, it’s a net win because I can cure that.”
Jane looked like she didn’t know if I was serious.
“I’m joking. Like, ninety percent joking. My expression turned serious. “So, my daughters are involved in all this?”
“Yeah,” Jane replied. “Leia and Mindy showed up, the adult ones, and told us to seek you out.”
“Why didn’t they seek me out directly?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Maybe because I’m their former babysitter.”
“I swear, my life is like the Terminator sometimes,” I muttered. “My adult children regularly come to visit me from the future.”
I had two daughters by different mothers: Leia and Mindy Karkofsky. Leia was Cindy’s daughter and had been born a Super with the power of hyper-cognition and telepathy. The short version being that she could build spaceships when she was a toddler and knew what sex was as “That icky thing adults are always thinking of.” Mindy was Gabrielle’s daughter and a genius herself with the power to lift small planets as well as light-based telekinesis. In the future both grew up to be time police in the latter half of the twenty-first century. Apparently, that was a thing when humanity got its crap together.
Despite the fact I was one of the worst time criminals ever, they regularly showed up to get my help. I got the impression both were eager to spend more time with their father. Which meant that I probably was not around while they grew up. I had to admit that was part of the reason I’d switched to being a superhero. I wanted to see my kids grow up and give them the horrifying example that would hopefully scare them straight. Unfortunately, that had been the exact motivation my brother Keith had when he’d retired and gotten himself killed by Shoot-Em-Up.
“So, your relationship is like the X-men,” Jane said. “Rachel Summers and Cable.”
“The who?” I asked. “Never heard of them.”
Jane glared at me. “I sent you those comics! Like I wasted a wish from a genie to send you then.”
I rolled my eyes. “Listen, it’s hard to keep up with your fake superhero comics.”
“Fake comics?” Jane asked, appalled. She looked like she was about to seize the steering wheel.
“We have historical comics for the Society of Superheroes but those aren’t as popular,” I replied. “I don’t see why people would want to go read about a bunch of made-up superheroes when we have the real thing.”
Jane shook her head. “Oh my Goddess, I’m in a goofier Watchmen.”
“Is that a comic too?” I asked.
Jane looked at me strangely. “Okay, what does Alan Moore do in your world?”
“The wizard?” I asked.
“Okay, that fits,” Jane said. “Stan Lee?”
“The science fiction writer from the Fifties?” I questioned, wondering where all this was coming from. “The guy who made the Incredible Mister Hyde and Fantastic Force novels? That Stan Lee?”
“Huh,” Jane said. “Steve Dikto?”
“The Objectivist cult leader?” I said, now curious how all these people related.
“Ugh, poor guy,” Jane said. “Jack Kirby?”
“Nazi Basher?” I asked, remembering the Jewish superhero. “He retired to Hollywood and made a bunch of psychedelic movies about alien gods.”
“Okay, your world is both a little bit cooler and still lame for not having superhero comics,” Jane replied. “I’ll have to go on a shopping spree before I go home. By the way, if David Bowie or the Beatles have any extra tracks they put out in your world, I’ll be stealing them to make a vast fortune.”
I blinked, confused. “Is something wrong with David Bowie in your world? I mean, I just saw him last week at the alien-human friendship concert.”
Jane gasped in stunned surprise and clapped her hands together. “I take back everything bad I said about your world!”
I was glad to have Jane back in my life but nervous at her statement about returning to her world. Maybe it was selfish—and I was one of the most selfish people the world had ever produced on a good day—but I wanted here to stay here with me. I was the one who sent her away for her own safety and regretted it every day. I also regretted sending away G because he had been forced to return to his crappy cyberpunk dystopian world where no one flew or thought of superheroes as anything other than a thing that children believed in.
The car eventually reached an abandoned factory not too far from where my office had burned to the ground. Merciful had demolished most of the traditional supervillain hideouts in the city during his brief reign as First Citizen—no more abandoned amusement parks, haunted houses, or underground sewer palaces—but there was a decent number of factories left. Blame the economy not being something even my evil doppelganger could fix overnight.
“This is where you are hiding out?” I asked, not overly impressed. “I mean, it’s not even a factory with a theme. I think this place just used to make aglets.”
“What now?” Jane asked.
“The little plastic things on the ends of shoelaces,” I replied.
“Ah,” Jane said. “We’re just holding up here after destroying the Left-Handed Bokkar’s army of zombies. We’re going to move on to fight the demon Satano in a few hours, but I stopped by to help you.”
“I killed the Left-Handed Bokkar,” I replied, offended. “He’s not coming back.”
Jane looked at me. “It’s another guy using the name. You kill one villain another takes up his name.”
Yeah, that was another thing we were dealing with. “Right.”
Driving my car through the chain-link fence’s broken gates, I parked the car and headed on inside. The interior of the factory was dark, dust-filled, and had more than a few magical runes drawn on the wall in blood. All of them had been defaced, though, in order to deprive them of power. I caught a glimpse of Amanda Douglass, aka Nightgirl, in the rafters looking down and wondered if I’d see any of my other old friends here. She was a hooded Asian American woman with glowing eyes that had done her best to slip into the late Nightwalker’s shoes. Even on my best day I’d never be half the hero she was.
“Where is my daughter?” I asked, finally looking at Jane. David was sitting on her shoulder, looking nervous as if something about the factory unsettled him. He was being quiet, and I appreciated that.
“Over here.” Jane gestured with her head and I followed her around some equipment to see a makeshift hospital bed where I saw Mercury Takahashi and John Henry Booth standing over Mindy. Mercury was a short, red-headed, Korean woman who dressed like classic Lara Croft and John Henry Booth was a tall black man who wouldn’t be out of place in an Idris Elba remake of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. There was no sign of Leia and I had to wonder where my other daughter was.
“She’s injured,” I said, looking over at Mindy.
“Yes,” Jane said. “Pretty badly. Where’s Gizmo?”
“Out for supplies,” John replied. “She’ll be back soon. Probably. Time travelers are like that.”
“Leave us,” Mindy said, coughing on the bed. “I need some time alone with my dad. Well my dad and Jane.”
Mercury nodded and turned to John as they departed.
“Hi,” I said, deeply concerned about Mindy. I walked over to her and took her hand before looking down at her. Mindy appeared a couple of years older than me now and looked like she’d come out on the losing end of a war. She was lying there, one eye bandaged and missing one arm. She had all the strength of her mother but looked like she’d been beaten within an inch of her life.
“Merciful Moses, Mindy, what the hell happened to you?” I asked, unable to keep my opinion of her condition to myself.
Jane elbowed me in the gut.
“Sorry,” Mindy said. “It’s just I’ve been fighting in the Great Crisis.”
“I think that’s copyrighted,” Jane said.
I elbowed her back for that.
“The Great Time War?” Mindy suggested.
“That’s definitely copyrighted,” I replied. “The BBC’s lawyers are scarier than mine and he’s a literal demon.”
Jane glared at me. “Focus, Gary.”
Mindy rolled her one good eye. “Fine, let’s call it the Big Ass Time Disaster.”
“That works,” I said. “What is it?”
“Diabloman destroying the universe,” Mindy said. “He’s using the power of Entropicus and the Seven Beasts to unmake reality. It’s the Norse Ragnarok, the Christian Armageddon, the end of the Aztec calendar, and a dozen other ends of everything. It’s taking all the heroes of time to fight it.”
“Diabloman is destroying the universe again?” I asked.
“Not quite,” Mindy said. “This is the first time he’s doing it.”
I blinked. “I hate time travel. It should only be used for killing Hitler and sleeping with historical celebrities. You know Jack Kennedy was almost your sister’s father.”
Mindy looked amused, though that quickly faded away to more pain. “I understand Julie d’Aubigny and you almost gave me another half-sister.”
“Awesome lady, people reading my memoirs should look her up,” I said. “So, you got seriously injured fighting a war that’s already happened.”
“Not quite,” Mindy said. “The Big Ass Time Disaster—”
“Are we really calling it that?” David asked, sitting on a nearby crate.
I shot him a deadly look. I’d hoped he’d keep his opinions to himself during this conversation.
“Shut up, David,” Mindy said, with surprising venom in her voice. “Call it the Time Disaster.”
“Oh you know him?” I asked.
“All too well,” Mindy said. “The conflict is taking place outside of time. Therefore it can’t ever really end as long as it’s ever happened. As long as it has happened, Entropicus can continue to summon reinforcements to try to change the result of the battle. The consequences of this are damage to the fabric of space-time that are constantly being felt in your world as well as others.”
“I have no idea what the hell you just said,” I said, nodding along.
That wasn’t entirely true because I knew about Diabloman destroying the universe in the Time Disaster, which was a much better name for it anyway. The Society of Superheroes, Superhero Legion, and Club of Champions, among many others, were gathered by Death to battle the forces of entropy. In the end, the universe was destroyed but they rebuilt it. Unfortunately, the universe had become a darker and nastier place. The beautiful Silver Age Earth my archnemesis Merciful came from was replaced with the gritty Iron Age Earth I lived upon. I’d eventually killed Merciful and brought his world back as the tenth Planet in our solar system (or ninth depending on your opinion of Pluto). It was a crazy bit of storytelling but, as Jane was wont to say, “It’s a comic book universe out there.”
“I know how to explain it,” David said.
“You do?” I asked.
“Remember in Back to the Future when Marty lifted up the picture of his siblings and they started slowly vanishing?” David said. “Reality was in the process of changing but Marty had a grace period to fix things. It’s kind of like that.”
“Oh Goddess,” Jane muttered, feeling her face. “We’re actually using Back to the Future as an example.”
“If it works, it works,” Mindy said. “I’m the time cop here. Well, was while there were time police. They’ve all been all killed except for me and Leia. Your little thing about banning resurrection allowed us to defeat the Great Beasts and capture President Omega, but it was at a heavy cost.”
I still wasn’t following the logic here. “Just so we’re clear, this Time Disaster is screwing with things in my reality. Causing… what, people to vanish?”
“More,” Mindy said. “It’s what causes time compression in your reality.”
I blinked. “Holy crap. That’s not normal?”
I knew of time compression only because I had done a lot of time traveling and had come back a few times to find things changed. I also stored my journals in extra-dimensional space that let me keep things out of the effects. Even then, I probably wouldn’t have remembered if not for the fact that I was Death’s Chosen.
“What the hell is time compression?” Jane asked.
“It’s a thing that happens in superhero worlds like Gary’s,” David explained. “Basically, say, superheroes appeared in the Thirties. They save the day, get old, get married, and then have families before dying. Time compression results in them suddenly moving to the Fifties when they appeared. Their families vanish. Their children appear later. Events that took place over a decade happen over the course of a month. It screws with people’s sense of reality.”
Jane stared. “In my world, that’s just comic book companies mucking with continuity so they can keep Spider-Man single forever.”
“A spider man is a terrible idea for a superhero,” I said. “No one likes spiders.”
“I will force you to watch the Tobey Maguire movies if it kills me.” Jane rubbed her temples, looking like she was getting a migraine. “So, comic book time is a thing in your world? Or what my mom would call soap opera time?”
“Hell yes it’s a thing in my world,” I said. “It’s been screwing with my life for a while now. I can’t say how long either. That’s the result of this Time Disaster? To think all of the retcons and weirdness in my previous memoirs were actually foreshadowing.”
Mindy gave a short nod. “It even exists in your world, Jane. It’s called the Mandela Effect there.”
The Mandela Effect was in my world too. Basically, someone mentioned they remembered hearing Nelson Mandela died in prison despite the fact Ultragod forced the South African government to release him after defeating the Afrikaaners. Dozens of other people reported remembering the same thing. While some people—sensibly—assumed this was a sign of people remembering things wrong, others believed it was proof that multiple realities were crashing into one another.
Jane’s eyes widened. “What can we do to stop it?”
“Gary needs all of the remaining Primal Orbs,” Mindy said. “Only with the combined power of all eight can he end the Time Disaster and save the multiverse. Then this universe will no longer suffer time compression, retcons, and other horrors.”
I stared at her. “You know, every time I’m required to help the cosmos reset itself, it always seems to make my universe more boring.”
Mindy frowned. “For history to move forward, the Age of Superheroes must end.”
“I object to this plan,” Jane said.
“Good,” I said. “I like the Age of Superheroes.”
“No, I object to making you God,” Jane said.
I shrugged. “Can I really do a worse job?”
“Yes!” Jane shouted.
“Well too bad,” Mindy said. “Dad is the only person in the world who is willing to give up the power after getting it.”
“Well, then we’re screwed,” I muttered. “Do you know where the other orbs are?”
“Yes,” Mindy said. “You’re going to have to retrieve them, too.”
Great.