Introduction to Volume IV: Civilian
I graduated from Arbor State University in the spring of 1984—a year late, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere and at the time was still trying to live down. Briefly, I attribute the delay in part to what I call my delayed freshman crisis. Being a studious student, it took me a couple years of college before I came out of my shell socially and sexually, aided by more extroverted friends and various psychoactive substances, not to mention a serendipitous, protracted hookup with Yarn Man.
Another impediment was my discovery, in the summer of 1982, that I was a natural-born megahero, which earned me a costume and some quirky new colleagues. As Ms. Megaton Man, as I called myself, the few adventures I’d had, if you could call them that, were a distraction at best, only making my return to the dean’s list that much more challenging.
The summer following graduation, I took a stab at New York City, joining the reconstituted Megatropolis Quartet with Liquid Man and Yarn Man—although I had some trouble making it clear to Bing we were now just friends. The team had been moribund since 1980 when its skyscraper headquarters, the Quantum Tower, had been bombed to smithereens by dastardly megavillains. But by 1984, Liquid Man—a.k.a. Rex Rigid, the brilliant but resentful scientist and leader of the group—had devised a way to restore the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters by simply cutting the identical skyscraper from an alternate reality and pasting it into this one. Atom for Atom, the structure—including the megahero headquarters occupying the top four floors—were the same, except that in the other reality, the sixty floors of office space below—that in this reality had served no purpose whatsoever and had sat largely vacant—were occupied with businesses and workers, all of which came along with the building into this reality.
Consequently, instead of living the glamorous megahero life in the Capital City of Megaheroes as a member of the most famous megahero team in the world, I had spent the summer of 1984 helping to relocate the displaced persons that had resulted from this interdimensional patch job. Luckily, the Phantom Jungle Girl and Rubber Brother—the other new members of the group—had backgrounds in social work and philanthropy back in Detroit. By networking with every social service in the New York-Megatropolis bureaucracy, we were able to clean up, more or less, the enormous mess Professor Rex had inadvertently created.
But the experience had left me exhausted. For that matter, most of my experience since becoming a megahero had been a bust. Instead of battling intergalactic evildoers or megalomaniacs attempting to take over the world, I’d sat through endless meetings with start-up megahero groups discussing hair-splitting bathroom policies, or dealing with jealous backbiters such as the Domina, a talented Youthful Permutation who’s pathological obsession with me as America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero compelled her to spread nasty, slut-shaming graffiti—most of which was true—all over southeastern Michigan.
The few adventures that could actually be described as such had either been anticlimactic or troubling or both. For example, my trip to the Forbidden Future. There, Kozmik Kat and I had faced down the Megaton Mice—not exactly the most formidable threat to world. But at least I got to meet my hero, Dr. Winifred Wertz, whose career as Gargantuella I knew mostly from old coverless comic books, and who had gone missing from our present timeline back in the seventies. Winnie, along with Rex Rigid, had been wunderkinds back in 1940, when the whole megahero thing had gotten its start, and were among the thirteen scientists the government had sequestered in the top-secret Doomsday Factory in New Jersey in the run-up to World War II. Their job was to create the first Atomic Soldier. Among the thirteen was my own grandmother, Mercedith Robeson-James—as far as I know, the only African American among them.
The group split along theoretical lines, with half a dozen physicists devoted to the Megaton theory, the other half to the Meltdown. A Thirteenth Scientist, apparently little interested in building an Atomic Soldier at all, dabbled with something called the Mutanium Particle, an finitely powerful Mote in God’s Eye that originated in another sector of the galaxy and had been isolated in a billiard-sized sphere of Extanium, the most powerful buffering agent in the universe. Later nicknamed the Cosmic Cue-Ball, the Thirteenth Scientist toyed with object as his colleagues argued whether to create a Megaton Man or a Meltdown Man. However, his attempt to split the Mutanium Particle backfired, and he split reality it two instead.
This rupture sent the Megaton scientists to one universe and the Meltdown scientists to another, were they proceeded to create the Original Golden Age Megaton Man and Major Meltdown respectively. This gave birth to two completely incompatible megahero universes, with completely different costumed characters, teams, and megavillain, as if they had been concocted by rival comic book companies. Rex Rigid and Winnie Wertz spent the rest of their careers, when they were not megaheroes themselves, figuring out ways to crossover with the other megahero universe, Rex inventing the Time Turntable and Winnie a Dimensional Portal, with unforeseeable chaotic results.
When I met Winnie in the Forbidden Future, she had retired from both megaheroics and science, and had come to regret all the dimensional crossing over and time travel she had done. The side effects of all this, she came to realize, had only been the creation of more alternate timelines and confusion. She warned me that every time one took a trip—on the Time Turntable or through the Dimensional Portal—one was creating a new, alternate timeline. This, apparently, amounted to a preservative law of the universe: it was impossible to disrupt your own timeline, therefore a trip across dimensions or through time was always a trip to another reality, one that your trip was creating.
But it also meant something even more horrifying: Even if you managed to get back home to the reality from which you started—the odds of that being staggeringly small—there was always also another reality in which you never came back. This meant all the loved ones and friends you left behind, even if you were lucky enough to see them again, never saw you again—at least in some alternate reality. This Winnie referred to as the Tragic Realization of Temporal-Dimensional Travel.
My entire life, I had lived the consequences of this. My Grandma Seedy had been one of the Meltdown scientists; I never knew her growing up, because I lived in the Megaton dimension. My mama, Alice James, never saw her mother after 1940, and assumed her dead for more than four decades. My own father, Clyde Phloog—the Silver Age Megaton Man—took a trip on Rex Rigid’s Time Turntable in the early sixties and promptly got lost in another dimension. So my mama was twice abandoned, and I never knew my father or grandma.
In the four decades since reality had been split apart, there had been innumerable crossovers and time trips between the Megaton and Meltdown Universes. Megaheroes alone probably accounted for the creation of scores of alternate realities all by themselves. And how many broken hearts?
All I can say is, all those sci-fi stories you ever read or watched on TV are just bullshit.
I suppose was lucky, because by 1984 both my Grandma Seedy and my father—Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man—had turned up alive and well and had returned to this dimension. But according to Winnie’s theory, in some other reality they hadn’t. And that bothered me.
What was baffling was that my mama’s counterpart from another reality had also come over to this dimension. This second Alice James was just like my mama in every respect except that, in the reality she was from, she wasn’t a mama at all. Instead of raising two girls—me and my sister Avril—Alice2 had spent her life as the costumed crimefighter known as the Mod Puma, partner romantically and megaheroically of the Silver Age Megaton Man, whereas our mama was just Mama, and had always just managed a Civix Savings and Loan.
This only further inspired Avie in her ambition to follow me into costumed crime fighting and declare herself the Wondrous Warhound. However, being my half-sister, she lacked the requisite Megaton gene and, consequently, possessed no megapowers. Luckily, her costumed persona had so far remained largely a performance art piece, but it still made me anxious. That’s because I had had a vision of Avie in another reality trying to save my life—and getting herself killed. And just because something happens in another reality doesn’t mean it didn’t really happen.
That’s the other thing. Even though our reality had been split apart in 1940—essentially creating two rival megahero universes, one Megaton, the other Meltdown—for some reason, they were now showing every sign of fusing back together. This was exemplified most notably by the same city being referred to by different names—New York and Megatropolis—depending on who you talked to. In practice, it meant that the descendants of the Original Golden Age Megaton and Major Meltdown—the rival families of America’s Nuclear-Powered Heroes—now existed in the same reality. This, every Multimensional theorist will tell you, wasn’t supposed to happen, and yet was happening despite—or perhaps because of—all the dimensional crossovers and time traveling. This had led to some unusual reconfigurations, most notably when the third-generation Bronze Age Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl, a Meltdown, hooked up and had a baby, my second cousin Simon Phloog. Although Megaton Man had swallowed the Cosmic Cue-Ball and absorbed all that Extanium, losing his megapowers, and was just plain Trent Phloog when I met him, and although Stella Starlight had retired from being the See-Thru Girl, their offspring—a Megaton-Meltdown—had the potential of becoming the most powerful Megabeing of all.
Luckily, three-year-old Simon seemed like a normal kid—so far. As a newborn, Rex Rigid had subjected him to some mysterious process that seemed to subdue his megapowers, although there was always the chance those megapowers might reassert themselves. But for the time being at least, this allowed Simon to live a normal life with his civilian parents in Ann Arbor, even attending the Arbor Harbor Daycare and Preschool. It also allowed Stella to prepare for grad school like me, while civilian Trent worked at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New books, forming a literal if unconventional Nuclear Family.
Overseeing all the megaheroics were the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning and Pentagon Office 17a—two creepy, rival quasi-governmental agencies. Secret Agent Preston Percy, who had been Megaton Man’s handler before the Man of Molecules lost his megapowers and boyfriend of controversial columnist Pamela Jointly’s before he came out of the closet, became an annoying fixture in my life not long after Pammy, Stella, and Trent arrived in Ann Arbor. After I broke out as Ms. Megaton Man—saving Trent and Preston both from a precarious stack of firewood—Preston seemed to regard himself as my handler, too. Finlay W. Greeley, a grey-flannel bureaucrat from 17a who wielded a particularly menacing briefcase, also intruded into my life from time to time; he seemed particularly perturbed that America’s Newest Nuclear-Powered Hero had emerged not from a top-secret government experiment, but from an accident of birth—mine.
But no one—not even Winnie Wertz, let alone Rex Rigid—could explain why the Megaton and Meltdown Universes seemed to be coalescing, let alone pinpoint exactly when that process had begun. All Multimensional theory declared such a fusion of dimensions impossible. Apparently, reality could only be infinitely split apart, whether by monkeying with the Mutanium Particle or stepping off the Time Turntable or through the Dimensional Portal, but never fuse back together. And yet, the proliferation of megahero crossovers back and forth between the Megaton and Meltdown Universes seemed to be stitching the two dimensions back together, even while spinning off a profusion of alternate realities within the myriad and ever-expanding Multimensions. Yes, I know I just said a mouthful there. This would be a paradox to say the least; nonetheless, it seemed to be exactly what was taking place in my little ol’ reality.
Even more baffling was that other disparate, disconnected realities were being drawn into the mix, as evidence by characters who were just as nutty as—and therefore indistinguishable from—garden-variety megaheroes. One example was the Phantom Jungle Girl, who seemed to more properly belong to some pulp adventure reality; another was Michele Selket, the Asp, who I can only assume originated in a mythological world. Last but not least was Kozmik Kat, a talking funny animal. I rest my case.
But then I’m forgetting the Partyers from Mars, who weren’t from the planet Mars at all, but from another sector of the galaxy altogether. The Partyers, so named because they had no natural defenses against simple indigenous Earthling pleasures of like sex and psychoactive substances—I have this in common with them—these diminutive aliens had sojourned to our planet to retrieve the Mutanium Particle, but had failed repeatedly and spectacularly. From what I’d observed, they weren’t bound to time and dimensions as the rest of us, their saucer, the George Has a Gun, presumably possessing technologies that left the Time Turntable and Dimensional Portal in the dust.
Whether this gave them omnipotence or omniscience, I had no idea, but it put them in the class of beings I dubbed the Archons, although I had no idea what they called themselves, or whether they would recognize each other as belonging to such class. Among these, I suspected, was the Reverend Doctor Enoch Azazel Japheth, pastor of my own church, the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. Although Pastor Enoch tended a flock of intellectuals and bohemians in a relatively small, neo-Gothic building near the Warren Woodward University Campus, and ran the Eats On Feets program and other ministries for shut-ins in the North Cass District, he also offered housing to Youthful Permutations in the form of a communal residence for live-in caretakers for the church. But he also seemed to know a great deal more about megaheroics, the splitting and the fusing together of realities, and the organization of the Multimensions in general than he was letting on.
Finally, there was Professor Joshua bar-Joseph, the mystical art history professor we called Doctor Messiah, who inhabited the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute, but did not seem to inhabit any particular dimension or temporal period. I was pretty sure he was an Archon, too. But I was also half-convinced I was losing my mind.
All these mysteries and ethical dilemmas weighed on me in the summer of 1984, along with the prospect of another four to six years of grad school in which planned to study urban policy and social planning issues. Somehow, I knew that being Ms. Megaton Man was going to interfere with that, even more than it had threatened to derail my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the fact I’d had little time to think of sex during my foray in New York, and needed to get laid really bad.
Did I mention that I was also biracial and bisexual? If not, I’m sure it will come up.
Next: On the Down-Low
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| The first sketch of the Ms. Megaton Man costume, 1989, inked 2010. |
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