The Incredible Atomic Man

The Incredible Atomic Man

David Don

 

"-an't defeat me!" 

His voice echoed through an empty stone room.

The Incredible Atomic Man frowned and looked around for a second. He did not recognise this place. It was all computers, lights and screens. Nobody attended them, though. He was here alone.

Blast it, he thought. He must have been teleported, because not a second prior to this he had been floating above skyscrapers, in battle with his nemesis Osmosis. God knows what he's doing up there now, thought the Atomic Man.

Gathering his wits a bit, he now perceived that he was standing in a glass enclosure. He tried to move and found that his legs and arms were clamped in place by metal pincers secured to the alloyed frame of the transparent case. This was all very specific and elaborate. He used his amplified strength to rip an arm free, and in so doing he tore half the case apart, with glass raining down on him. It was so easy that he tried the other arm, with he peeled out with average human strength.

He laughed out loud. If Osmosis had meant for this to trap him, it was an ill-planned endeavour. He kicked his way out of his restraints and shattered the glass panel in front of him. He began walking the room. The stone floor and the emptiness made each footstep an individual boom.

He reached a silver elevator door, flush with the wall. Next to it was a small chrome panel with a black square at the to.

He wondered where he was. He had assumed he had been sent to the depths of Osmosis' building, but he had seen the inside of that old rickety lair many time times and the elevator had a set of round buttons that you pushed for your floor - man, he knew that guy far too well. But this elevator did not seem to have any buttons at all.

He ran a red-gloved hand down the panel anyway, and it shimmered and lit up. 

"Floor?" said a woman's voice coming from the panel.

The Atomic Man jumped. "I- huh, um, well..."

"I'm sorry," said the voice, "I don't recognise that command. Floor?"

He cleared his throat. "Um, Ground Floor. Ground Floor, ple-"

"Ground Floor," said the voice, and the doors slid open.

The inside of the car was equally strange. A silver bottom with a mirror running along all four walls. The doors smoothly shut and he started to rise. As he did, he inspected his own face. His face and skin were mostly fine. In fact they looked better than he would have expected, given the fact he had just been flying through a dense urban area fighting a super-villain for an hour. 

His costume, though. It was worn, and coated in some light dirt, or dust maybe. It needed washed after he finished Osmosis off, anyway.

Eventually the voice spoke again. "Ground Floor."

The doors slid back open and he stepped out. He was in a giant lobby, ceilings maybe twenty or thirty meters high. A reception desk sat unattended against the back wall, where he had come out, and other than that the large room was empty except for a few chairs and potted plants, some overturned, and a disc-shaped metal platform in the center. The opposite wall, which bore the gigantic entrance, was all made of glass. 

He started to walk towards this wall. Outside it was an amber scene, with a completely deserted street. Even with his enhanced vision, he could not make out a sign of life anywhere. Osmosis had sent him further away than he had thought. He didn't recognise the street at all.

He walked past the platform on the ground and music started to play, just a short electronic jingle, and he turned to see that the white translucent projection of a woman had appeared on the platform. 

She spoke with the same voice from the elevator. "Welcome to Outreach. What would you like to know?"

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You are in the headquarters of the Outreach Corporation, hub of great minds and the interstellar liaison for Planet Earth."

"I- what? Earth?"

She said nothing.

"Who is Earth 'liaising' with?"

"Planet Earth is relatively new to interstellar communication, but we are on track to one day become a crucial point in the intergalactic trade markets."

"Have aliens been on this planet?"

"We have established contact but so far no visitation has occurred. There are plans, however, and our first visitors should arrive within the next decade." She kept her stoic expression, staring off ahead at no-one, as if this was no great revelation.

He just stood there. This had to be some sort of joke. He was being played with.

"Who does this place belong to?"

"The Outreach Corporation is owned and overseen by Jack Orwell, its CEO and founder."

"Where is Orwell?"

"Jack Orwell is indeed accepting visitors right now, and can be found on the 98th floor, in his office."

The Atomic Man was already on his way back to the elevator when she finished speaking. He barked his instructions at the chrome panel and the doors yielded to him.

As he ascended, the mirrored wall faded to clear glass and he saw the city all around him. It was one he had never seen, but it didn't look normal anyway. Grim orange light rested over the whole of the sprawl, caused by the cloudy sky, and the dim ball of light that glowed off in the distance. 

The city was wrecked. Tall and short buildings all over the place were crumbled, concrete lay on the streets, and there didn't seem to be any movement anywhere. Smoke poured into the sky from the more broken parts of the wasteland, and the desolation was of such magnitude that the Atomic Man could hardly bear to look at it all. The sheer emptiness scared him the most.

"98th Floor." The doors opened, and before him was a red carpet. He walked up through the room, which was decorated in gold and velvet, with oak paneling and furniture lain around the room. The same orange light fell in from outside through a gigantic set of windows, which were behind a great desk with a chair at it, pointed away towards the windows.

"The Incredible Atomic Man," said the voice of an old man. "I have been looking forward to seeing you."

"Jack Orwell?" he was nearly at the desk now.

"Call me my real name."

"Osmosis."

He turned his chair, and he really was an old man. A very old man, actually.

"What's going on? Where are we?"

"We're in the last days of a better world," said Osmosis. He slowly, painfully, forced himself up, shaking, and hobbled around the desk. He seemed like he had lost height, and was now a full head shorter than the Atomic Man. He wore a suit - not in spandex, or lycra; a full, pressed black suit, with a tie.

"Why are you... like this?" asked the Atomic Man.

"I'd love to bemuse you with riddles like we used to do," said Osmosis, "but my mind's not really up to it. All I will ask is a simple question: what year is it?"

"1974," said The Atomic Man.

Osmosis only shook his head, sadly.

"You didn't teleport me."

He shook his head again. "After you were gone, it was so easy. I used my equipment and my mind, and I took over cities, and countries and finally the planet was mine to command. And do you know something, old friend? When I did it, there was no more war. No more conflict at all. I made them scared, you see. They united because of me. Because of their hatred for me." 

The Atomic Man couldn't process any of it. He just let the old man speak.

"I grew bored of it. They were my slaves, and after some time there is only so much you can do with slaves. They don't challenge you. You outgrow them. I devoted Earth's now unified resources to expanding out further into the universe so I would have more room to grow.

"I set up communications and I found it. Life in our galaxy. Life in other galaxies."

"And now," said The Atomic Man, "They're on their way. To this?" he pointed out at the charred desolation below them.

Osmosis shook his head once more. "My friend. They are not on their way. They are here."

The Atomic Man was confused, then he realised what it meant. "You provoked them, didn't you? You goaded them into it, and now the people you have made to suffer all your life will be finally destroyed for their trouble." He was shaking.

"I didn't provoke anything. They simply saw that we were here, that there was a place they could take, and they took it. Like I did all those years ago."

The Atomic Man had nothing to say to him, except: "Do we stand a chance?"

"There are some people left. They live underground now, cobbling together the weapons and supplies they can find."

"Is their any chance they can win?"

"The enemy's artillery is vast and complicated. Their numbers are many, their armour is tough and their ships are more advanced than we could have imagined. Yet, none of these are their most deadly weapon."

"What is?"

"Hopelessness." 

There was a pause.

"And what can we do about that, exacty?" asked the Atomic Man. 

"I can't do anything about it," said Osmosis. "I have built an empire by actively perpetuating hopelessness."

He waited a moment, then said: "You wouldn't believe what they have achieved even in their tunnels and caves. They have society - order, even. They have merchants, media, surveillance - they are likely listening in on this conversation right now. They'll know what we're saying, and they'll be watching it on their scavenged screens."

He walked over to the window. 

"Another pervasive development is religion - and mythology. Storytellers. Even up here, I have methods of hearing what they are saying. And they have been telling many stories. They have to. But there is one story I've been hearing more and more, lately. A story that stirred old feelings in me. That woke me from my boredom and despair, even for only a second
 
The story of an atomic man, a man who did not need to control great colossal planets, because he could control the tiny particles that made them up."

"What am I supposed to do?" was all he could answer.

"I do not know. I know only how to instill fear. But whatever you do," he said, looking up at a potted fern on his shelf, "remember what I told you: they are watching."

The Atomic Man looked at the old man, and for the first time tried to logically accept what he had done. He could see in his eyes that mass death had no great impact on him.

He tried to get his mind around the death, to really understand it. It only struck him when his wife and children's faces glanced through his mind.

"I used to come down and visit you, you know. Every day, after meetings, or when I was feeling the weight of the task I was undertaking. I would come down to the basement depths and stare into the eyes of the Incredible Atomic Man. Frozen, beaten. I could never have destroyed you completely. 
The silence, the lack of a retort, when I fired remarks at you - it was the sweetest sound. But I got bored of that too. I stopped coming to see you. It was no fun when you didn't have an answer."

In under a second The Atomic Man had hoisted Osmosis up by his tie knot and held him at eye level.

"The people are watching, hm?" he snarled.

Osmosis nodded.

The Atomic Man pummeled the window furiously with Osmosis' old body and smashed him through it. He took a step to the edge and held him out with one arm, dangling nearly a hundred floors from the pavement. The old man looked terrified and hurt, but didn't struggle.

"It's been good to see you again, old friend. I'm sorry I was away so long," said Osmosis.

The Incredible Atomic Man's eyes glowed blue. The old man turned into dust and blew away across the sky. He watched him drift away, and hoped that they had been watching it too.