I sighed, a sound that carried the weight of my entire disappointing life, and threw myself onto my futon-bed—an item that truly embodies the ‘multi-purpose’ despair of modern living—once I got back to my apartment. I immediately threw a small mountain of frozen hamburger patties into the air fryer. No, I didn’t use a microwave. I know exactly what a microwave actually does to food on a molecular level. I didn’t want to waste a single power point fixing the nutritional damage, and the air fryer cooked food just as well at a fraction of the energy cost of using a range or oven. I had to be efficient in all things.

  I needed the protein and carbs from a half-dozen burgers to start the slow, arduous process of recharging my metaphysical batteries. Frozen patties, lettuce, tomatoes, and a loaf of bargain-bin bread were a fraction of the cost of buying pre-made burgers from a fast food joint, and honestly, probably much better for me. I was no gourmet cook, but wrecking food with an air fryer was actually difficult. Another reason not to get a roommate—they would inevitably question why I needed two refrigerators and a chest freezer in a fifth-floor walkup, as if I were secretly a yeti or a particularly dedicated doomsday prepper.

  Like I told the cop, messing with electrical frameworks, even stuff like Bluetooth and digital wireless, was easy and took almost no energy. I was no cyberkinetic, but using my powers to simulate a wireless keyboard or mouse was pretty much a no-brainer. I did just that, bringing my laptop whirring to life from across the room. The Vilnet app was, to be honest, super illegal. But it was the sort of illegal that no one ever prosecuted, like jaywalking in a city that had given up on itself. It promised absolute anonymity, but it was a hefty enough program that my decade-old smartphone just couldn’t handle the load, so I had to keep it on my slightly newer school-issued laptop. I logged in, and I also checked the readout on my quantum displacement meter.

  Yup. Eighteen points. Ugh. Pathetic. I could only regain about ten points a day, even if I stuffed myself like a thanksgiving turkey, so I was looking at over a week of careful eating and light exercise before I could even consider taking a ‘Technotron’ gig—one of my old standby supervillain identities that looked halfway convincing even in repurposed junk armor. He was a fake technopath, which was easy enough to simulate as long as I was someplace with a lot of semi-functional mechanical and electronic garbage. I could muscle together some scrappy drones as minions easily enough. They wouldn’t be useful for anything except looking spiky and menacing, but throw on a few whirring saw-blades and maybe a welder or two, and they could trundle around stupidly, be intimidating for the cameras, and be wrecked convincingly by a hero. It was a theater, and my drones were the cheapest props on the stage.

  Glacier Girl, though, had left me a five-star-plus review, which made me grin despite my general state of misery. Apparently, she had REALLY appreciated my performance, and probably appreciated me saving her from a costly and potentially career-wrecking mistake that might have even gotten people killed. Not that she, or the publicist she was undoubtedly using, actually mentioned her superhero ID on Vilnet. That would be suicidally stupid. Heroes didn’t touch Vilnet, at least not in any way anyone could ever trace. They used cutouts and intermediaries, the same as us respectable freelance villains.

  Still, that glowing review brought my overall rating to a shiny four-point-five. That was phenomenal in my line of work, because there was always some douchebag hero who thought he or she was hiring a genuine supervillain to take a fall and go to prison to boost their apprehension rating, rather than paying for a harmless publicity stunt.

  Like ANYONE with flashy powers would willingly accept a criminal record and jail-time for less than twenty grand. My first one-star rating had actually come from a walking testosterone overdose who called himself ‘Hot Shot’. He’d done his best to literally kill me, since he thought he was buying a fall guy, and got all pissed off when I refused to lie down and let him arrest me.

  He hadn’t been very bright. His strategy involved smashing and causing massive destruction to get to ‘Technotron’ rather than cleverly foiling my plot to turn the mayor’s mansion into the set from ‘Maximum Overdrive’ unless my price was met. He kinda wrecked the mayor’s mansion in the process, as well as several pieces of artwork that the London museum (it was a touring exhibit) got VERY upset about.

  Not that my machines could have actually hurt anyone. Sure, they looked scary, but a toaster with little robotic arms was still made out of a crappy toaster that even a toddler could have disassembled safely, as long as he remembered to unplug it first.

  My ‘price’ had been ONE MILLION DOLLARS in a conscious, and I thought hilarious, nod to Doctor Evil. But Hot Shot’s flaming entrance and subsequent spree of property damage had wound up costing the mayor and the city almost eighty-eight million in repairs, and when he realized that I was really escaping, he decided to skip the arrest and turn the ‘unrepentant supervillain’ into a charcoal briquette.

  That had been near the beginning of my illustrious career, almost eleven months ago, and I had learned a lot since then. First off, I had been flirting with the idea of becoming a male hero back then… I mean, male heroes that could actually get on a team were considered rare and elite, and the girls… well… some of the guys slept their way through entire teams, and alpha girls were always spectacular. The promise of money, poontang, and worship was a heady mixture for a lonely college kid.

  But that incident made me realize that celebrity also went to their heads. I mean, the guy gave me a low rating because I wouldn’t let him KILL me. Male heroes, in my limited experience, were almost universally absolute enema-blenders, and I made a solemn vow to refuse any future jobs with them. My mental health couldn't take it.

  That was also the closest I’d come to breaking my own ‘no killing’ rule. You know what happens when you cover someone, even a fire-based hero, with a thick layer of ice, cutting off their oxygen and flash-freezing their tissues? They can’t be ‘melted’ later with a hair dryer and wrapped in a warm blanket with a cup of hot cocoa. No, they die. Horribly. After my little fit of pique and turning him into a human Popsicle, I’d had to blow a truly astronomical amount of energy—energy I desperately did not have—restoring his molecular blueprint before he died of frostbite, oxygen deprivation, hypothermia, and muscular crystallization. It had been weeks before a new persona could make an appearance, and I’d nearly been evicted for failure to pay rent.

  And then he had the unmitigated gall to give me a one-star rating. He didn’t even leave a review explaining WHY he left the single star, probably out of embarrassment, just a big fat drop in my previously pristine 5.0 rating. But I triumphed over my innate villainous urges and did NOT stop by his house to demand an explanation. Or to turn his car into a puddle of oxidized iron.

  I could have. I mean, with microkinesis, tracking a unique quantum signature is as easy as following a painted line, and I even stopped outside of his new apartment building once, after he got a sponsorship deal and moved out of his mom’s basement. But I was made of stern willpower, a true paragon of self-control and discipline.

  Well, that and I didn’t want to blow my secret ID. Mostly that second part. Attacking a hero in his secret ID was almost as big a no-no as letting innocents die. Kicking his ass while he was trying to polish off his breakfast Wheaties in his tidy-whites would have been a worse career move than just accepting the bad review and moving on, even if I REALLY wanted to put his damned fire out for good.

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  Especially when I saw him swat Aquamarine’s ass as she did the walk of shame from his high-end apartment the next morning. Yes, that Aquamarine, the playmate-class five with sonic projection and water manipulation, with the DD cans and the glittering blue skin that was probably trademarked. The universe just loves to rub it in.

  Yeah, my life is a tragedy in three acts. Before I awakened, I was a high school geek, focused on classes and getting into the right college, way too busy and awkward to have time to date or have fun. After I awakened, I became a college geek, way too focused on classes, rent, and not dying from energy debt to have time to date or have fun. I was just religious enough to feel weird about the whole hook-up culture thing, and the fact that girls now went out of their way to make me notice them—a common side effect of being a male alpha, it turns out—just made the whole frustrating situation that much rougher. It was like being a kid in a candy store while wearing a muzzle and having no money.

  I might have mentioned that male alphas are rare. Honestly, we are. The prevailing theory boils down to XY versus XX chromosomes. Women potentially had two superpower ‘slots’, one for each X chromosome. If they were lucky, the power was broad and had a higher power rating potential, and the two powers were complementary, like force fields and magnetic control.

  Men, on the other hand, had a single slot. It was often broad and self-reinforcing, which meant there were fewer men, but the ones that existed often had decent power ratings. But something about the Y chromosome, supposedly, was bad.

  Bad, as in if the Y chromosome somehow develops a second power, the power self-destructs, killing the guy every time, often in gruesome or horrifying ways. The ‘net was filled with horror stories and blurry videos about men who started to develop the stigmata of a second power, and then something horrible happened that killed them and occasionally everyone around them, like teleporting into a wall and causing a matter-antimatter explosion that took out an entire city block. Most of the stories were fake, but enough were terrifyingly real that it was a constant, low-grade terror for every guy with powers.

  The worst part was, q-powers only usually started to express themselves under extreme duress, as a sort of reaction to a life-and-death situation. It was impossible to predict WHO would get a superpower—it’s sort of rare, like one in a million—and the form of that power was completely unpredictable and somehow related to the stress that caused the power to jump-start.

  If you got thrown out of a plane without a parachute, there was about a one in a million chance you would gain a superpower before you hit the ground. And even if you do, it might be a minor power that isn’t enough to keep you from going splat. I mean, how much would it suck to be flying towards the ground at terminal velocity only to suddenly discover that you could levitate… except that you were a class one who couldn’t actually change the speed you were already levitating at, and you are still traveling towards that big green ball at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Yep, you found your superpower. Congrats. You are still dead.

  There were some death cults back in the seventies that promised to awaken powers in normals through extreme trauma, but those were pretty much self-defeating since their success rate was a solid zero.

  But, you know, there are a thousand minor tragedies a day even in a place like the old Unified States of America, and a statistically significant number of those tragedies involved women. So in the end, the hero gig pretty much was a woman’s world, just like the traditional emergency services were a man’s game. As a man, even as a class three or higher, trying to make it as a hero often puts you in competition with a lot of women, many of whom had their powers awakened as a result of some kind of conflict with a man, and a lot of whom had two powerful abilities that reinforced each other compared to your one. Talk about a hostile work environment before you even fill out the HR paperwork.

  Men also tended to be more… resistant to authority, which is why a higher-than-normal percentage of men with a serious power rank wound up doing the private-sector or villain thing. While the hero gig was maybe one man out of a hundred, powered criminals were closer to one in five. Which made an alpha male jogging near an ‘incident’ something that the police would just… instinctively view with justifiable, if annoying, bias.

  Six delicious hamburgers, two fryer baskets full of hand-cut french fries, a cup of fry sauce, and a shower later, and I was feeling a lot more human. I’d also regained a whopping two power points for my troubles, which made me feel marginally better at a solid twenty. I had an evening class in about an hour, and since I was so low, I’d probably burn myself into intentional power debt before I worked out later. The energy was already wasted, so I might as well take advantage of the chance to possibly add a fraction of a point to my pool, even if it meant I headed into training looking like I’d already been rode hard and put away wet. It wouldn’t be the first time. The campus gym was used to seeing me in various states of metabolic distress.

  A short drive to the school and an eminently forgettable class session about warehouse management logistics—thrilling stuff—later, and I was at the campus gym, having burned through my meager energy supply during my walk from the parking lot by practicing holding a bubble of kinetically-charged air around my body while moving. It’s a stupid-looking way to walk, but it’s good practice.

  So why such a boring major? Well… long explanation short, Logistics and Supply Management was one of those careers that would always be in demand. It was not elite, it was not sexy, it was not STEM, but a guy who knew how to wrangle goods from point A to point B, and how to keep a plant or retail system from imploding, would never have to fight for a job. They were the duct tape of the corporate and manufacturing world, and if their plant or distribution center shut down? There were always a dozen more looking for a qualified supply manager who didn't have a track record of embezzlement.

  Then again, a lot of us succumbed to the temptation of profiting on the side by purchasing cheaper materials and pocketing the difference. That was another reason that your job was almost guaranteed, because the last three guys were in prison. The temptation was enormous.

  It was one of those secret careers that had almost no status attached to it. You’d never be on a board of directors or be clamoring your way to the top of the pyramid, and yet you’d always be well-paid if you knew what you were doing, you’d never get downsized unless the entire company was falling apart, and if you GOT fired, you’d get snatched up again in a week. In a world of flashy heroes and villains, being the guy who knows how to get the anti-kaiju missiles to the coast on time and under budget seemed like a solid, stable life goal.

  And it was a lot less boring than accounting or systems analysis. Hell, if I played my cards right, becoming a global logistics supply officer meant both stability and constant, exciting world travel. I would never have the power of flight (let’s be honest, running on kinetically neutral air doesn’t count), but I would love the power of first-class air travel with cute stewardesses and jetset destinations. It was a trade-off I was willing to make, even if the rare kaiju attack made air travel dangerous.

  I had no illusions that it would all be fun and games. It would be a lot of hard work, but I was no stranger to hard work. Ever planned an exciting, multi-stage supervillain scheme? Trust me, bringing all the pieces together into an aesthetically pleasing superhero battle required enormous amounts of planning, sourcing, and scheduling. Logistic management and the part-time supervillain gig went together like pie and ice cream. They both required an obsessive attention to detail and a slightly unhealthy relationship with spreadsheets.

  Heck, even if someday I went legit and went to work for a hero organization, it would be as one of the ‘chair guys’ behind the scenes. And guess what skillset and career path would make the best choice for keeping a team outfitted, supplied, and in the right place at the right time for whatever interdimensional horror came their way? That’s right, logistics. I was building a fallback career with a skillset proven by my life of crime. The irony was not lost on me.

  I was sort of patting myself on the back for this brilliant, if depressing, life plan as I pushed through the double doors leading to the gym, distracted by my self-congratulatory reminiscences and the fact that I was kind of stumbling and exhausted from self-imposed energy debt. Which is why I was completely unprepared when something small, fast, and surprisingly hard hit me square in the face.