High above the city, dark hair flowing down his sculpted shoulders hovered The Aegis, shield of the gods, the perfect man. The Medusa face on his breastplate pronounced death to the wicked with its judgmental glare, though it seldom did its job, since the ethics of petrification, are, to say the least, a quagmire. Even the hooded madman before him, whose body crawled with metallic nanoinsects would not deserve a life trapped forever in stone.
“This ends now, Malevolence!” declared The Aegis, raising a fist that shattered tyrant tanks.
“The Singularity Man laughs at your threats. Your fate is the fate of all things, and that’s gray goo. I devour your inertia, I take your potential energy.”
The Aegis’ punch slowed beyond a crawl, seeming to turn to a fragment of a fragment of a frame, and the hooded madman, whose body danced with a million robotic bugs hummed with power, physics itself repurposed for the whims of The Singularity Man.
“I take in your potential,” said the Singularity Man, giving back a strike of his own, with thundering force, faster than light, “and I shit out death!”
The punch penetrated the breastplate, the flesh, the ribcage underneath it, and inside the body of the hero, The Singularity Man grabbed at his heart, yanking it out and leaving in its place the insects. He unceremoniously dropped the organ to the ground to splatter below, while inside the demigod’s body, the insects cauterized the wound with tiny lasers.
The Aegis didn’t get to properly die, his brain functions rebooted straight away. Blood swimming with new respirocytes, the hero was now part of the Singularity Man.
Jenny was there, she was him, The Singularity Man. She was there and had been there many times over the past couple weeks. She would cease to be Jenny for minutes, given instead the experience of tearing a heart from the chest of The Aegis and being the one man that could be. It was the beeping from her computer of 100 tokens, gratuity for a glance underneath her oversized Misfits shirt that roused her from thirst.
Were she thirty pounds lighter, she could have asked for 200, 300, 500. Were she thirty pounds lighter, maybe they’d be more polite. Maybe. Maybe it wouldn’t be “tits BB” or “show your fat ass”. If she were thirty pounds lighter, maybe they would actually express some concern that she was staring blankly, into her webcam, past her webcam for minutes at a time, periodically twitching as she experienced the still beating heart of the world’s greatest hero in her hands. Whether this was so or not, this was how she felt. Like she was a person who sat and stared until a man a thousand miles away deemed it the time for her to get naked.
It still beat waitressing. And it seemed like the sort of thing that beat flying around murdering superheroes to absorb them into a technoorganic bug hive. She dispassionately pulled the shirt over her head, gave her pale double D cups a shake.
“Mmm, thanks Bonersaurus! Hope you like ‘em!” she forced a smile past the image of the most important person in the world dead at her armored hands. If they were her armored hands. They certainly felt like hers or at least like that they could not be anyone else’s. She forced a smile past remembered sensations of daydreamed skittering swarms inside and on her. She forced a smile past no job, no future and no ideas in a world where an invulnerable mangod flies through the sky righting wrongs and rendering man as he knew it obsolete. That smile had a great way to travel and during that time, it had grown quite weary.
She went back to waiting again, seeing little potential. Her breasts were out, which changed the situation somewhat but now instead of just confused and afraid, she was confused, afraid and topless, trying to do a job that she barely wanted to do. She gave her magenta hair what she thought was a seductive flip, and trained her sad, brown eyes on fields of imaginary hardons to let them know she knew that they were out there and to let them intuit that she cared.
There’d been a time in which she had cared and the thought of a man’s excitement over a body that wasn’t Cosmo, Vogue or Hustler was enough to make her feel grateful for the attention. The novelty of this wore off, as it became less about admiring her body and more about making demands of it. The object of desire had become a utility. She felt this quite keenly as she waited for somebody to ask more of her, to pump another quarter in a woman turned arcade cabinet.
She shuddered a little upon seeing one particular username. Struck a raw nerve. TheAegis69. Every man wanted to be The Aegis. Every woman wanted The Aegis, every alien tyrant and giant robot wanted to be the one to rid the Earth of The Aegis. Had she become more superintelligent orangutan or mad scientist than woman? Was she the subject of desires not her own? This wasn’t The Aegis, just some guy bragging about the strength to go at it all night.
“Wow,”she said with a histrionic eyeroll, “nice work taking down Slaughtercus last week, Aegis. Is your cock strong as fifty men? Wanna go private and show me?”
No reply. Nothing at all. She found herself wishing this was the actual Aegis saying he was alright. She even wished this was the actual Aegis asking to see her asshole. The Aegis probably wanted to see SOMEONE’s asshole. Why not hers? She was thirty pounds overweight. She would be lucky if anyone did, let alone the ultimate man.
An hour passed and nobody asked to see her asshole. Fifty more tokens. She flashed her pussy a moment and the room went quiet as a tomb until somebody asked if everybody was watching the news and saw that The Aegis had just thwarted Science Pirate. There was some “Who the fuck cares?” Some “show pussy!” Some U-S-A! No tips. The Aegis was alive.
That was something. And there was nothing. The session faded out. The cocks softened, the tips stopped and Jenny was alone with Jenny. Alone with Jenny crushing the heart of the hero, alone with Jenny floating above the Earth and preparing to put an end to it surrounded by a chitinous cocoon of living machine. She stared at the ceiling and at the world that broke beneath her in her daydream until at last she slept.
She slept as The Aegis flew over the city, concern in his heart of hearts over the welfare of those below. The hero used vision unnaturally honed and hoped and prayed that the tiny, bored things wouldn’t break each other. He hoped and prayed to the old gods that had gifted him his powers that they would be okay and that he wouldn’t fail to miss any of the fragile. He hoped and prayed that the world the old gods made had plenty for everyone.
Grey and clanking, crawling and clicking, the vermin that he missed crawled out from under Jenny’s bed and up into the future, a future that began with one imperfect body. Crawling up on commodified tits, drilling into improper belly. The insects crawled into her ears, spoke to Jenny, promises far sweeter than a couple hundred tokens. No deal was made, instead just a statement of facts. This was the glorious inevitable, vita nuova, evolution. They soaked up fat, re sculpted muscle, chiseled the bones in her round face down to sword sharp points. That which was Jenny slid away, and she was ready to reawaken as the one person it was alright to be.
Garrett Cook is an author of horror, Bizarro and Mythos fiction. As well as writing such Bizarro books as Time Pimp and his recent collection You Might Just Make It Out of This Alive, he is also the editor of Imperial Youth Review. He works as a freelance editor and teaches workshops in the Bizarro genre.
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