io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt, 12/11/15

In the Future, Even the Monoliths Bleed

You sort of imagine the monoliths being these massive, imposing things, like in the movies. Something the primitive apes would look up at in awe. Origin and purpose still a mystery, all that. At least, that's what you think for the first few seconds it takes for someone to tell you about the monoliths, because the next thing they tell you is that these black constructs are microscopic. Atomic. That they have been infiltrating the Earth for billions of years, but nobody saw them.

Then that someone tells you that they bleed.

Then someone else tells you that it's not blood, at least that's not what Dr Contreras says it is. Contreras has collected over a hundred billion of the things in a tiny sea of liquid xenon under the Black Hills in South Dakota. He says it's a byproduct of the gravitational lensing they produce. He calls it the Red Milk.

There are people down there in that cloistered lake who drink the Red Milk and speak to God. Jamal has been collecting their reminiscences into poetry as the Milk decays in their brains and forms electron bonds on its way out, normalizing. He wishes he had the guts to take the stuff, but the Red Milk terrifies him.

There are the typical calls Upstairs. They say Contreras is a cult leader, a fifth columnist. Congress threatens to cut off their funding every day. There are protestors lining out the gates of the lab, because God has been speaking and the things It is saying are not what the world is ready to hear.

You've Regenerated (Casino Royale)

fig. 1: Not Hannibal Lecter

When Die Another Day premiered in November of 2002, it was already dated. An overblown fantasy of a film, its conceits were undermined not only by the real-world events that overtook it, but also the arrival a few months prior of an identically-monogrammed action hero: Jason Bourne.

Plenty of ink both real and digital has been spilled in the thirteen years since The Bourne Identity premiered about the effect it had on the James Bond franchise--as well as action movies in general--and it would be boring for me to rehash it all here. Suffice it to say it was seismic. James Bond had to adapt. He did this by using one of the franchise's longest-used tricks: the appropriation of whatever was popular at the year of the film's release. 2006 was a big year for parkour, Texas Hold 'Em poker, and, of particular note to this film: reboots, and prequels.

fig 2: I can't tell you how many rounds of Texas Hold 'Em I played during 2006.

Just the year before, Batman rode the proverbial reboot train (in his instance surely heavily self-branded) to the rejuvenation of his entire franchise. Battlestar Galactica returned after twenty-five years away all grim and politically aware. Even King Arthur got a gritty reboot, in 2004. While on some level the Bond franchise reboots every time a new actor is cast, they are nominally playing a character on the same trajectory. Sean Connery is tracking Blofeld at the opening of Diamonds Are Forever to avenge the death of Tracy Bond, who married George Lazenby the film previous before getting unceremoniously fridged. Eighteen years later, Timothy Dalton would visit Tracy Bond's grave.

The rules were different for Casino Royale, thanks in part to a fortuitous freeing-up of the rights to adapt the book, the first in Fleming's series of novels about the character. (British copyright law is weird. I'm looking in to it. Definitely for Never Say Never Again.) With the original novel to play with, the producers could claim "back to basics" in a way no other outing could claim to.

Indeed, gone are most of the bells and whistles which so defined the franchise and its numerous descendants. The film's main villain, Le Chiffre, though recognizable as a Bond antagonist through his single moniker and his creepy bleeding eye, is not some would-be world conqueror. He's an embezzler. His stakes are decidedly and in that harrowing torture scene he injects a bit of realpolitik back in to the proceedings. "Even after I slaughtered you and your little girlfriend, your people would still welcome me with open arms," he tells Bond. "Because they need. What I know."

And then Le Chiffre is killed, in a bit of franchise-building to set up the next sequel. In that moment before, however, all this low-fi storytelling pays off. It's hard to imagine James Bond failing when it's a megalomaniac threatening to blow up South Korea, but when it's him alone in a room with a bad guy and a chair and a lenght of rope, where the stakes are only a couple hundred million dollars and whether or not one terrorist goes free, you get the sense that he might actually lose.

This is, to me, the essence of Craig's appeal. Though most of the rough edges of that original interpretation of the character remain, he's fallible and vulnerable in a way that none of his predecessors managed. This is, again, the franchise playing catch-up, this time with a modern storytelling that emphasizes the kind of interiority that James Bond, in his cinematic incarnations at least, never possessed.

When I was growing up, I was sort of aware that James Bond was around and that he'd been played by these different actors. The Roger Moore films were a staple of basic-cable outlets like TBS and the like. Same with Connery. I've seen snippets of both Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and Never Say Never Again several times out of context. Somehow, Moonraker shook out as the film most likely to be seen randomly about three-quarters of the way through its run, at any given time of day. The first James Bond film I saw in the theater was a Brosnan entry, but not his first. It was Tomorrow Never Dies, which I saw with my brother. So Brosnan was already the incumbent when I saw him on the big screen, and his transformation into a new actor was something that, to date, I had not witnessed.

What a brutal, assured transformation that was. The black-and-white noirish opening, the quick-cut editing, the subversion of the classic gun barrel sequence. For these essays I rewatch a Bond film a week, but for Casino Royale I felt compelled to rewatch the debuts of each of the other actors to play the part. In GoldenEye, you see Brosnan in glimpses: from afar: hair, then eyes, then full-face and a lame quip. In The Living Daylights, a group of mountain climbers, of false leads, a pair of guys who are meant to look more like Bond than Timothy Dalton, red herrings if Dalton's face wasn't all over Daylights' promotional material. Live and Let Die eschews Bond for the entirety of the cold open before cutting to the title song, then a soft-focus shot of a sleeping lady and a pull back to Roger Moore. On Her Majesty's Secret Service delivers that famous fourth-wall-breaking quip. This never happened to the other fella. That said, even with those films, their in-film debut comes after a full-on shot in the opening gun barrel sequence. What's the point in building up your lead in fits and starts if everyone's already seen him take that shot in his tux? The gun barrel subversion, coming at the end of a brutal, violent sequence, is one of the first of Casino Royale's great statements of purpose.

fig. 3: Funny that Campbell would go on to direct this piece of shit.

That physicality permeates the film. Craig smashes through a wall, he gets beaten and bloodied. The camera follows the havoc he wreaks, the consequences of it. He emerges from the water in a scene that deserves to be as iconic as Ursula Andress' first appearance in Doctor No. Combine this with a villain not interested in something as fanciful as taking over the world but rather in staying one step ahead of MI6 and his own terrorist empolyers and the message is clear: James Bond has come down to Earth.

As a series of spy films set at least nominally in the real world, the James Bond franchise has to constantly negotiate that balance between the concerns of the real world and the franchise's own drive to break left and do something completely strange. Bond himself is a fictional character bound by fictional rules and conceits. He works for a real-world organization and a real-world country, based out of a real-world building that, in Spectre, will be demolished because of the actions of a fictional terrorist. More than any other era, the Craig films are about that negotiation between the world of realpolitik and the world of monologuing supervillians and esoteric death traps. These four films represent a long negotiation between James Bond and the world. But to see where they might go next, it is perhaps necessary to keep looking back.

Some Utterly Comfortless Place Where You and I Can Suffer Together (Quantum of Solace)

fig. 1: The first Google image hit for the word "quantum."

Let's start with that title, shall we? Everyone else did. "Quantum of Solace," as a title, makes no damn sense. Which, as director Marc Forster and star Daniel Craig took pains to point out on the press circuit preceding the film, isn't exactly a deal breaker with James Bond films. A View to a Kill? Antiquated and strange. Thunderball? What the hell is a "thunderball?" Octopussy? Bizarre and only just coherent based on an in-film mention, which, to me, is what sinks Forster and Craig's rationalizations.

"Quantum of Solace," as really any trivia page concerning the film will tell you, is the title of a James Bond short story as well as a phrase within that story, concerning the bare minimum of good feeling that must be present between two people for love to exist. Except, unlike Octopussy or GoldenEye or Thunderball, this phrase is not only not mentioned, it is undermined by the name of the latest ersatz SPECTRE, an international crime syndicate composed of government-toppling fixers. You can argue that the aforementioned "quantum of solace" is what James Bond achieves by the climax of this film, coming to terms with the death of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, though, again, the vibe Fleming was going for was meant to exist between couples. To say nothing of the fact that the term is beyond obscure. "Solace" is a word most people probably know, sure, but "quantum," at least as Fleming used it in 1960, to refer to "a tiny little bit of something" is far from in common use today. Mostly when used these days, "quantum" refers to "sci-fi hokum." Moviegoers were more confused than intrigued.

What they got upon arriving in theaters in 2008 was a direct sequel to 2006's Casino Royale, something that had until now (and, so far, since) not been done in a James Bond film. Already we're out of sorts, disoriented by a frenetic car chase that reveals the hero only in glimpses, and dropped square into the memory of a film from two years ago. It's been said, by the guys at the excellent James Bonding Podcast, that Quantum of Solace improves considerably as the second-half of a four-hour epic, but that's not how they were released, or how the films were planned. Q of S was hobbled by the 2007's Writer's Strike and much of the direct-sequel elements were added hastily to a barely-finished script. As a result, James Bond accidented into modernity.

The popular conceit is that this present Golden Age of Television and its focus on serialization and character complexity began with The Sopranos in 1999. (Nerds will tell you heavy serialization actually started with Babylon 5 in 1994, but, come on, it's not like anyone was actually watching Babylon 5.)  By the time Quantum of Solace premiered nearly ten years later, television was awash with intricately woven tales of complicated anti-heroes. This moral complexity bled into the rebooted 007, and the focus on serialization followed. Even though the subsequent films are less direct sequels, Spectre takes pains to connect all the disparate dots in the Craig era, from Le Chiffre to Mr. White to Skyfall's Silva. After decades of being handed files by M and going out to wreak havoc and screw, James Bond is caught up in a different type of story than the one to which he's become accustomed.

In fact, remove Bond from the equation altogether and what you're left with is a political thriller tied to Bolivia's recent water crisis, complete with a nebulous geology report, coup-happy general, and a sleazily corrupt CIA bureaucrat with his morally compromised partner. Drop James Bond in the mix and watch the situation warp. All of a sudden lowly MI6 filing clerks are showing up to the airport in nothing but a trench coat, before being theatrically murdered. Slickly ultramodern hotels run on hydrogen and sit out in the middle of the desert, and eventually explode.

There is a tension, then, to this film, as there is to all the films of the Craig era, between the franchise doing what it's used to doing and the demands of a new century. Quantum of Solace occupies an interesting position in the Daniel Craig films in that it is the least interested in responding to other James Bond films. Where Spectre and Skyfall are at least in part about reestablishing classic elements of the mythology, and Casino Royale is about showing this character we've followed for decades before he was as we knew him, Quantum of Solace is about James Bond the character, and how he might survive in the media landscape of the twenty-first century. Results were, at the time, to say the least, mixed.

Quantum of Solace represents a limit case, of sorts. Its political gamesmanship, its dour take on the series' main character, its frenetic action editing, they all seemed to add to the general bad vibe about this film, and would largely go unrepeated. Stack this against any film of, say, the Roger Moore era, and feel the whiplash ensue. This movie, then, represents a sort of limit case, the furthest out point the Craig era will reach from the consensus reality of James Bond pictures.

It is worth wondering, as a thought experiment if nothing else, what lies beyond those limits. James Bond is never going to fight Batman, for instance, or Cthulu, though I'd pay good money to see either. While he might be fallible, and human--especially in this age's focus on conflicted antiheroes, he's never going to be wrong. Not in a deep, intrinsic sense. He's never going to be something other than an escapist figure. To the extent that it gets anything wrong about James Bond, Quantum of Solace gets this wrong. James Bond is meant to be a figure of escape, for a man penning these stories to put off thinking about his impending marriage, for an empire crumbling into irrelevance, for people looking to visit exotic places, for "men wanting to be him and women wanting to be with him," James Bond is meant as a way out. If nothing else, that's why he's kept it up all this time.

Wearing a Bit Thin (Skyfall)

fig. 1 Not a Bond villain

Spectre, and the James Bond film that immediately precedes it, Skyfall, are of a kind. They share the same cast, the same director, the same anxieties. Part of Spectre's unease has to do with the emerging surveillance state. Though, of course, not because the surveillance itself might be a violation of our basic liberties, but rather that such a thing could be perverted by some transparently evil bureaucrat secretly on the take from a shadowy international crime syndicate.

Similarly, at the heart of Skyfall is Silva, a man who announces his intentions by broadcasting on the Internet the names and cover identities of five deep-cover MI6 operatives. He is the terror of the digital age for a department run on secrets. WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, the year Daniel Craig arrived in the Bond role. In 2010 and 2011, they released thousands of documents pertaining to the US and UK's game of empire in Afghanistan and Iraq, including footage of a US helicopter gunship indiscriminately gunning down Iraqi civilians in 2007.  "We can't keep working in the shadows," Mallory tells M. "There are no shadows anymore." What could be more frightening to an army of spies?

Except, in the end, Silva is not Julian Assange. He is, as the logic of these movies dictate, a product of MI6's own ecosystem, an ersatz double-0 given up by his handler and left for dead. He does all this out of a personal vendetta against M. The little people that get in his way are just collateral damage. He is a stateless despot, a glowering madman in the tradition of the genre. There's no question raised here about the ethics of gathering secrets, or of upending the systems that run on them. For the twenty-third time in twenty-three movies, James Bond fights a cipher.

Silva runs his operation out of an island he took over by manufacturing a fake crisis. He destabilizes multinationals from his computer. He rigs elections. He hacks spy satellites, gas mains, and MI6 itself. Earlier in the film, Q tells Bond "I'll hazard I could do more damage on my laptop in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field." Thank God Q's on our side.

fig. 2: Still from 'Wes Anderson's James Bond'

Spectre will later rehash the counterargument Bond makes here. When asked what he needs Bond for in this brave new world, Q responds that "Now and then a trigger has to be pulled."

"Or not pulled," Bond replies. "Difficult to know which in your pajamas." It is this tension that animates Skyfall.  While the two computer geniuses, Q and Silva, play tug-of-war with their technological jiggery pokery, Bond absconds with M to his ancestral home, explicitly stating that he's going back in time. Faced with a monster from M's past, Bond retreats into his own, to a looming old house with no wi-fi, no phone, and only the deliberately low-tech defenses they can rig up themselves to aid in their defense. Indeed, Bond escapes through a priest hole, an old escape route dating back to the Sixteenth Century. Sometimes, as we're reminded by different characters throughout the course of Skyfall, the old ways are best.

At fifty years in, this feels like the franchise trying to justify itself, and it would feel even more so if Skyfall weren't such a beautiful, confident film. Bond is positioned again as a throwback, even though this version of him has barely been a double-0 for six years. He's distrustful of Q's youth, drives a car made before he was born, and shaves with an old-fashioned straight razor. The Bond films can't help but be self-conscious about their own age. Indeed, the film puts Bond on his back foot for much of its running time. He's haggard, worn out, the toll of the human dimension of intelligence weighing him down. He's nearly broken by starring in a spy movie in the post-Bourne Identity era.

In fact, he only seems to recover as his status quo grows closer and closer to the one we're familiar with. Moneypenny, in the field at the start of the film, takes a desk job. MI6 moves out of its slickly modern fortress into a cavernous bunker, and M, played by Judi Dench since 1995, is replaced by a stiff upper-lipped middle-aged white man. The final scene of the film is part of the Jungian memory of these movies: Bond in M's office, receiving a file, being sent out into the field. Even now, the landscape is shifting back.

Thought You Were Going to Say He Was Your Secret Brother or Something (Spectre)

fig. 1: Not James Bond

Spoilers for the film Spectre, if you haven't seen it yet.

Spectre is an uneasy film. It is an anxious film. At the heart of its anxiety is the place of James Bond in the world, both as a person in his universe and as a cultural artifact in ours, and for much the same reasons. Having just set up shop in Skyfall in a set of subterranean Churchill-era bunkers, a move which, along with most of the rest of Skyfall was meant to telegraph both "back to basics" and "this is a prequel, you guys," MI6 is upended and meant to blend in to MI5, which is presently run by the scheming, oily Max Denbigh. Someone makes the observation early in that Denbigh went to school with the Home Secretary. The actor who plays him, Andrew Scott, is thirty-nine, which would make him about twenty years younger than Great Britain's actual Home Secretary.

This is, of course, deliberate. Compared to Daniel Craig (47) and Ralph Fiennes (52 and looking older) he seems to have more in common with the youthful Moneypenny and Q. He, and the ultramodern, transparent glass building that houses this new era of British Intelligence are THE FUTURE, and it's something everybody at MI6, at least everybody with any lines, is concerned about. M gives a not-exactly-impassioned (he is British) speech about the license to kill being a license not to kill, in a sense arguing in favor of assassination so long as the assassin is a person and not a predator drone. Denbigh is unmoved. He represents progress. Progress, and the anxiety of a fifty-three-year-old film franchise starring a forty-seven-year-old man has about its place in the world.

He is also, of course, evil, and his scheme is so transparently a bad idea that it's a wonder it took this coterie of seasoned intelligence professionals so long to figure it out. He wants to share intelligence information with a dozen other countries, with vastly different aims and goals. All in the name of thwarting terrorism, the obvious byline for this sort of thing, and the tenuous connection this film makes to real-world events.

It is worth pointing out that this film was released the same year as Kingsman: The Secret Service, a movie that is chock-a-block with Bond pastiche. In fact, 2015 was a banner year for spy films. Mission: Impossible flew in another outing, and there was Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which both also deal heavily with the classic iconography of 1960's James Bond films, and that's before films like Bridge of Spies and Sicario, offered more grounded, realistic takes.

It's that iconography that gets at the heart of Spectre's unease. If the Craig films represent a limit case for how far the franchise can stray from its roots, then throughout Spectre you can faintly hear the sound of the elastic snapping back, and much of this comes specifically in the form of Franz Oberhauser, or, as he will become known as later in the film, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Blofeld here represents two tropes I personally detest at work. The first being Surprise! This evil organization of which you've never heard is secretly behind all the seemingly-unrelated hokum with which you've been dealing! The second? Surprise! The bad guy is secretly connected to the good guy and hates him for something to do with their shared past. That's right, kids. Bond and Blofeld went to ski-camp together.

After James Bond's parents died, he spent a couple years with a nice man who taught him skiing and all sorts of outdoorsy stuff. The man's egomaniac biological son grew up to found--or at least run--a secret organization of evildoers that he probably would have anyway, because he was crazy enough to murder his father for being nice to an orphan boy. What it leads to is an interesting dramatic irony common in these types of mythology-heavy franchise films. We in the audience of course know who Blofeld is--the die-hard fans, anyway--but the characters obviously don't. To them he's just another lunatic

On the one hand, we haven't actually seen Blofeld in forty-four years, not since he met his end in Diamonds are Forever. On the other hand, his baggage is all over the place. The boxes of his iconography are conspicuously checked. The Nehru jacket, the cat, the scar, the position at the head of a (literally) shadowy table full of (figuratively) shadowy individuals. After fifty years of appearances, pastiches, parodies, and cultural pollination, we already know who this guy is. What his deal is. And to have the head of this worldwide terrorist cabal be Bond's old ski buddy seems...petty. SPECTRE is meant to be a larger-than-life organization. To ground it in such a low human concern seems disappointing. To me, Bond and Blofeld are meant to represent these grinding engines of empire for whom the fight eventually gets personal. To have it start this way feels like starting the song in the loudest possible register.

You can see the reasoning behind why they thought this was a good decision. SPECTRE and Blofeld are the last pieces of the franchise mythology to be fit in to place in this long prequel series, and the Craig era has been defined by giving James Bond a sense of interiority that he has conspicuously lacked through most of his film appearances. So why not marry the two? Why not have this guy you vaguely remember and vaguely understand is important be tied up completely in the main character's past? Isn't that just the most elegant way to integrate character-focused drama and action-movie mythologizing?

But then, I never found Blofeld to be all that interesting, and he's further undermined here by trying to color in a character between the thick lines of quirks and signifiers. And Bond has been fighting Blofeld, in one form or another, for all those forty-four years the latter man was missing. The franchise is littered with ersatz Blofelds, particularly in Craig's second outing, Quantum of Solace, which goes to all the trouble of creating an all new, even more preposterously named International Criminal Syndicate, only to pretty much entirely discard the thing by Skyfall and have it exist only in passing mentions in this film.

There's a reason for this, and a reason we haven't seen Bond's perennial arch nemesis since 1971, and that's entirely down to the vagaries of British copyright law. But that's another story, yet.

For now the question the Bond films grapple with is where to go from here. The movie theaters are crowded with knowing homages and sly winks to the classic series, as well as the kind of brutal, frenetic, grounded, personal action pieces Casino Royale was reacting to nine years ago. The franchise must negotiate between these two poles, while at the same time trying to keep the character relevant in a shifting political and technological landscape. M once called Bond "a dinosaur, a relic from the Cold War," and that was in GoldenEye, twenty years and a whole other James Bond ago.

I've seen all of the James Bond films. I wouldn't consider myself a big fan, but big enough that I've seen twenty-four motion pictures starring the guy, and I'm thinking seriously about going back through his back catalogue and figuring out why what works for me works, and why what doesn't doesn't, and trying to imagine how this old dinosaur might amble its way onward into a new and perilous century.

Halloween

When the elevator doors open, I'm seized by the urge to run. They haven't seen me yet. No one will notice if I don't make it in. Just go back to the airport, wait for the red eye back to Tucson, pretend none of this happened write off the seven hundred dollar planet ticket as lesson learned

It's hard when everyone you know is a superhero.

There is a secret elevator in the Empire State Building that fewer than a thousand living people know about. It takes you to the Eighty-Sixth Floor--the real Eighty-Sixth Floor--where once a year the costumed adventurer set gathers to take off their masks and pretend for a little while to be whomever it was they were before radioactive moon rock or mystical snake venom or divine alien heritage hit their lives over the head with strangeness. It's all art deco and modern furniture. Everyone else probably came in rocket cars or invisible helicopters. I took a cab from La Guardia.

Done up in cocktail dresses and dinner jackets, everyone looks different. There's an anonymity here for most of us, at least the ones who still wear masks, who weren't outed by the media or long ago gave up on having a private life. They're all here: Samson, the Hourglass, Immaterial Girl, the Yeoman. If the Tarantulist or Collapsar knew where this annual soiree was..but, then, I suppose Halloween is a big deal for them, too.

I'm late in arriving, which was of course the plan. I blend in to a sea of blandly attractive faces. This is, in fact, the first Halloween I've attended in five years. Where did the time go? Everyone looks so good. Everyone else looks good and I'm offering a silent prayer of thanks to whichever god of fashion deemed the button on my jacket should clasp at just the spot to obscure the nascent pot belly I've been carrying the past eight months.

With what I personally gauge to be a heroic effort not unlike that time I fought Azazel the Undying atop a speeding Amtrak train, I sally forth and try to mingle, first heading to the bar. Whose idea was it to add alcohol to social gatherings? I should ask Samson, he'd know. He was probably at the first one. (As if he knows I'm thinking about him, I hear that booming enfilade of the Antediluvian strongman's laughter. You wouldn't' now it from news footage or blurry cell phone videos, but up close, Samson's hair is all split ends.) Whose idea was it to get a whole scrum of people together and give them each a potion that would render the sullen ones more sullen, the belligerent ones more belligerent, and the happy ones completely insufferable?

Half the attendees don't process alcohol in the normal way. There are cocktails at the bar specially marked, full of more exotic stuff. "What'll it be, kid?" the man at the bar asks me I recognize him at once. It's hard not to with the blue-white hair (a little faded and thinned) and the cybernetic arm peeking out from the rolled-up sleeve of his pressed white shirt. He's put on weight in his middle age and I'm imagining what he looks like under that shirt, now that the rest of him doesn't measure up to the metallic muscular perfection of his robot arm. Back in the Nineties, when I was first starting out, this was Captain Extreme.

"Whiskey and soda," I tell him, and he obliges. Back in the summer of 1994, Captain Extreme was the biggest thing going. Refugee survivor of a destroyed and abandoned future. Teleported to our time to beat the stuffing out of the likes of Deathcount and the Shrieking Violet. Now, here he was, pushing fifty, tending bar. My first Halloween was a couple years after Extreme peaked, when I turned sixteen. Jane and I and the rest of the Freedom Five, on special invitation to the Eighty-Sixth Floor. There were old timers tending bar then, too. The Silver Sentinel, maybe, or Mister Marathon. I didn't know. I swore that'd never be me. Something unsavory and depressing about it.

The Hourglass steps up to the bar. She never wears a mask in public, but nobody, here or there, knows who she is. The great misfortune of The Hourglass' life is that despite the fact that she has complete mastery over all of time, the only thing anyone in the media ever wants to talk about is how amazing she looks in skin-tight Kevlar. the time her suit got ripped on live TV during a fight with The Sideways Man is probably more deeply etched in the collective psyche of the United States than the September 11th attacks. She orders a club soda and Captain Extreme dutifully sets about.

"Know something I don't?" I ask, given she isn't drinking.

"Hello, Danny," she beams. Keep your eyes on her eyes, Danny. Keep your eyes on her eyes. Keep your eyes on her eyes.  "You're looking well. How's Tucson?"

"How did--?" I still haven't told anyone. After I got sidelined, I relocated. Best orthopedic surgeon in the Southwest. I could start my career back up once the physical therapy took off.

"You accidentally let it slip and it comes up again in conversation in sixth months."

I'm taken aback but it's hardly anything new for her. She doesn't experience time like the rest of us. I try and recover my footing, telling her that I suppose I should be glad they're stil talking about me in six months. "Wait, I'm not dead, am I?" the thought stumbles out as it occurs to me. "Is that why it comes up? In six months? Am I dead?"

"You know I can't tell you that," she says, dry as the air back home.

"But you can tell everyone I'm holed up in Tucson."

"Tucson?" It's--crap. I don't know who this is. i don't recognize him out of costume. "You meet the Horsefly yet? He runs out of there, I think."

Fucking time travel. The Hourglass just shrugs at me. I tell whomever-this-is I don't know who the Horsefly is but of course I know who the Horsefly is. Tucson, Arizona is a one-cape town. Smallest of the small time. I didn't expect some other mask to show up while I was convalescing. Imagine my surprise when I turn on the eleven o'clock news to find some guy wailing on drug runners out of a home-made ornithopter. I wonder if he's here. If this is him right now, running some sly self-promotional networking. I try my rusty detective skills. looking for traces of conspicuous Arizona sunlight. Probably a long shot. Some of us don't even make the trek. Street-level guys, especially. Guys like me. Like I used to be. Besides, I was never as good at looking for clues as I was at cracking heads

Whoever this is, he's turned his attention (naturally) to the Hourglass asking her if she wants to go out on patrol. I talk over him, chivalrous guy that I am, and ask her how often she gets asked for winning lottery numbers.

"How do you think I afforded this dress?" she asks, and smirks faintly.

"Are you serious?" I-still-have-no-idea interjects. "That's unethical!"

"Whoa, we got ourselves an Ethics in Time-Travel expert!" I interject, probably a touch louder than I need to be, but at that moment it feels cemented: me and her against the world. The Hourglass and The Lariat. All-American Team-Up. It's conceptual.

"I was there," she explains to me and to him and to the Nineties superhero from the 99th Century who's refilling her club soda. "I've been to the future. I already know I did it."

"You're saying there's no such thing as free will?" Seriously, who is this guy? It's maddening.

"Why did you want to be a superhero? she asks him, and before he can stammer out a reply she turns to me. "And, Danny, why did you fall in love with Jane? Out of everyone in your life, what was it about her?" I look for Jane instinctively, hoping she's nowhere close to where her name was dropped. "You were always going to be who you are. That's the way the world spins. There isn't any great mystery to it."

When I was a boy growing up in Oklahoma, my parents were killed. Not long after that, I met a man. The last true cowboy in the West. The Long Arm of the Law. He taught me how to fight, how to look for clues how to pick up the pieces of my life and shape it into something with a purpose. He was the best man I ever met. I was terrified of him.

It wasn't long before I met others like me. Young recruits, the next generation in a story that had been going on for decades, that had deformed and reshaped the history of the world. Our mentors all thought it would be a good idea to corral us together to learn some valuable life lessons while cutting our teeth on third-rate evildoers. It was me, Kid Achilles, Unicorn Boy, Heat Sink, and Jane, aka Skygirl. You never think when you're in it that this is the best time of your life, that this is you peaking. You never see the top of the roller coaster until you're already pointing down.

We grew up. Poor Unicorn Boy died. Kid Achilles became the Hoplite, Jane became the new Laughing Owl when the old one retired, and Heat Sink retired at twenty-one to start a refrigeration company. I still get postcards when he travels.

I went out on my own because that's what you do. Fought crime out of Phoenix until I tore my ACL in a fight with all four members of the Obliterati. All these fucking immortals. The Hourglass has been the same age since 1958. Samson can bench-press a city. What am I supposed to do with that? I look around this room at the demigods in tuxedos and sequins and I see why people hate them. I still limp on damp days, which, thankfully: Arizona. I put the suit on once I got out of the hospital, and I felt stupid. Nothing seemed to sit in the right place anymore. I wanted to wear it under my clothes (some of us indeed do that), but, again, Arizona.

Then six months happened. Then a year. The suit still felt binding and uncomfortable. I drove around the city taking notes. Bought a camera. Field work. Gathering intel. All studiousness and diligence, signifying nothing. I haven't seen Jane in five years, except on the news. I meant to write, scribbled out dozens of torn-up post cards and typed out a hundred deleted emails The pebble of my procrastination became an avalanche of neglect. Once or twice or a hundred times she tired to call and I let it go to voice mail, until one day I saw footage of her with some new guy clobbering a horde of invaders from beneath the sea. The Aquamarine. I'm sure he's here, tonight. I'm sure he's here with her. At any rate, I wish him all the best, the s.o.b.

Why did I come here? In theory I'm invited to these things every year. An envelope appears in my mail box, regardless of my change of address, every year on the first of October. Orange and black. You are cordially invited. I haven't been in all this time.

The Hourglass and Whoever-this-is-seriously-I-have-no-idea are getting into the weeds of free will and determinism and I am, quite without realizing it, on my fourth whiskey-and-soda. God bless you, Captain Extreme. I venture back out to mingle. I rub elbows with refugee alien gods, with cybernetic posthuman adventurers, with mystical strongmen and half-human mutates. Maybe it's the whiskey-and-sodas, but I feel suddenly buoyed by the bonhomie of all all these heroic types. Everyone here belongs here Even me, I tell myself, a good feeling that lasts precisely long enough for me to run into Jane. She slinks up to me in a black, floor-length dress, her arms like sculpted marble, and hands me a glass of champagne, and I, who fought a triumvirate of forgotten Aztec gods alongside the Scariest Old Man in the World, I feel the floor drop out from under me.

"Fancy meeting you here," she says. Her voice is all angles and edges; I can't make sense of it. Or maybe I can but I don't want to. Maybe I want to read a whole story into what was once a high-school crush, but has moved on, left behind like all the other mile markers of youth.

"Anything for free booze," I reply, and drain my glass more swiftly than I suppose is typically called for.

"We missed you at these things, you know. Couple hours in, it's always the same. 'Where's the Lariat?' Then there's the crying and rending of garments."

"This crowd? Sounds like a party."

Jane laughs and for a moment its old times, unrehearsed, and I'm back in time, sipping from a flask of something bitter and smoky we took off one of the Galloping Ghoul's henchmen. The pair of us at nineteen, my red-white-and-blue cowboy outfit and her feathered metal wings. Watch out, bad guys. Everywhere.

"So where have you been keeping yourself? I watch the news out of Arizona and I never see you."

I want to tell her a lie, that I'm still out there, pulling my weight, to tell her the truth, to own up to the truth myself, that I'm giving up,, that its a glacial process but one that is by now inevitable. I want to tell her what those times meant to me, what they still mean to me, but a man in a rented tuxedo who may or may not be the Horsefly interrupts everyone to say there's been an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan. All hands on deck. In a few moments, the room clears out Then it's just me and a few of the old-timers.

A while after that, its just me.

The Memory Palace

Clack clack of her heels on the tile steps, she's a stair above you, looking back. Dress swaying against her hips. Key in the lock, the darkened apartment back lit by the streetlamps outside. She steps inward a little and looks back to you.

***
Another one today. Breathless from turning down too many wrong streets. I'm sorry, he'll start and Armand will nod. Is this...? trailing off, and Armand will nod fishing out his keys. Fifty Euros.

"Fifty Euros?"

Sometimes the lad--and it is almost always a lad, will pay up gladly, Others, with others, Armand has push-back

"The cost is fifty Euros." Armand leaned in to his accent. This helped, particularly with Americans, who would rather pay the money than try and make themselves understood. Reluctantly, the lad handed over the money. Armand stood, body weight protesting against his aching, aging bones. Then they climbed the stairs together. How many times had Armand taken these stairs? How many in the company of some love-struck kid on holy pilgrimage?

The technology was about a decade old at this point. Synaptic encoding. Memory grafts. Great for learning, for training, fantastic for embedding journalists--for eliminating the need of journalists some said, for a black market in pilfered and repurposed memories.

Armand replayed the memory, a few times to make sure he got the details of her old apartment right. When she left the place it was in complete disarray. Clothes strewn about as she decided what was worth it to take. Bookshelves ransacked. The haste of a person on the run, and Armand had been minding this building long enough to know what that looked like. It wasn't long, two or three more lads showing up after she vacated, that he came up with the plan. They came from all over, sometimes three a week, enough that he didn't have to rent the place out again: he could set it up instead as a shrine in her honor. At first, Armand told the men she had died, but some of them would become inconsolable at this and difficult to move. Eventually he settled on vagueness. Try never to tell them what drove her away Young men never want ot hear they're part of the problem. It took him ages to replace the dress.

Too hot in the apartment, the two of you languishing in bed, the fan blowing wind from outside. Some joke you can't remember has her laughing. You wrack your brains but it's still gone. She is turning to you and it's the first time you know it. The first time you're certain.

"Do you know her?" the young man asked. Armand had little doubt the recording found its way to the brains of many an older man, but they were too jaded. They weren't as likely to board an--international, judging by this one's broken French--flight to Paris and storm the stairs of this inherited dream.

"Yes, I knew her." (Which was the truth.) "Quite well." (Which was a lie.) "She lived at this address five years." If the lad noticed Armand's use of the past tense, he gave no sign. Armand fumbled with the keys and opened the door and the lad stepped into his hand-me-down past.

Armand fumbled with the keys and creaked the apartment door open. "Just as she left it," he said, which was also a lie. The cramped studio had been subtly curated. The windows to the fire escape were open, and the noise from Paris below drifted in with the sunlight. She's all sunlight and water colors of birds, most of which, thankfully, she left behind in the haste of the move.

"Where'd she go?" The young man asked in almost a whisper. He moved through the tiny studio, brushing his fingertips against the furniture. Armand confessed that he didn't know. He left out the "why," as the young men who climbed the stairs (a few times it had been a woman, he wondered how the program shaped itself around that) didn't like to hear about every other young man who'd been there, fingering through territory he imagined was his alone to claim. It was best to let them down easy when it came to these things.

"What was she like?"

Don't you remember?" was Armand's standard reply. The lad sighed, frustrated. He remembered the week, of course. He remembered the apartment, but there were corners of it into which he never intruded. Seeing the place now, fully realized, made the memory flat and unreal, like visiting a childhood haunt after so many years away. Perhaps this, Armand suspected, was why he never saw the old men. It was a feeling by then they knew all too well.

Armand led no life of great adventure or acclaim. Indeed, to his lasting regret he hardly ever left Paris, though he supposed he should be grateful in this era of memory proliferation for that. Grateful that he never tarried too long with some girl through the lazy long afternoons of the last days of summer. His memories were worthless.

No. Not worthless. Unglamorous. For he had known love in his life, though perhaps not the desperate, longing, impossible kind of the type to be bought second-hand by eager and self-involved lads looking to define themselves.

She moved to Australia. After the first besotted young men armed with a life that was not theirs leaned in to her door bell and insisted that they had this connection, that they understood her, she packed her bags, and disappeared. It was only through the girl's parents, who rented the flat in the first place, that Armand knew any of this. Not that he would tell the lad. Not that he told any of them. And not that it would help. She may as well have moved to Mars.

"I'm not the first, am I?"

"Where did you get it?" Armand asked, by way of tacitly answering the man (Henry, he said his name was Henry)'s question. Henry explained that near his building in New York, a man set up a table with all sorts of strange and questionable wares. Knockoff handbags, bootleg movies on memory dot, and a thoughtstick full of memories. Henry knew what they were. He'd seen news specials. He walked by the stand every day, casually glanced out of the corner of his eye every day, found his pace slowing just a bit every day, until one day there was nothing. No stand, no sign of the man.

Months went by before the stall keeper appeared again. "I thought they got you!" Henry said in a jovial camaraderie that would later embarrass him. He was more relieved than he thought he'd be.

"They did," the stall-keeper said. "But this is a great land of opportunity for an enterprising man, and I am an enterprising man."

In the Parisian walk-up, Henry did his best impression of the stall-keeper, which Armand imagined did the man no justice. Henry didn't buy anything then, but struck up a rapport that would last until temptation finally overtook him. "I've never been in love," he confessed to Armand as he must have confessed to the stall-keeper. "It just never happened for me. I went to school, I got a job, there were dates, I guess, but..." he trailed off in the quiet stillness of the apartment. "Esau said he had just the thing."

"Would you like to be alone?" Armand offered. It was not an offer he made regularly. Sometimes the visitors could be violent. Other times they would masturbate into the curtains.

Henry's gaze moved about the room. "I just want something...something to remember her by."

She smokes pot on the fire escape that overlooks the city. You know what you are going to say. You are dreading it. Your mind now furious at your mind then. She's wearing the dress again, the dress from that night, bare legs dangling shoeless over the edge toward the noisy street below. You feel strange being out here after so much of the last few days in there. As though the apartment has been your world and sitting out here, watching the sunset, you may as well be astronauts.

A not-uncommon request. "Oh, well, Monsieur..."

"Henry. Just Henry."

"Monsieur Henry, by now you have surely deduced your friend Esau was hardly the first to pass along this lost week. I cannot very well pawn off the Mademoiselle's things to every young who climbs these stairs."

"Bad for business," Henry mused, another all-too-familiar aspect of Armand's dealings, the contempt of the customer, creeping in.

"As you say." Armand admitted. It took practice to make the next part sound unpracticed. "Although...New York City, you say?" Henry nodded at this, still sullen, still scanning the room for some magical trace of her. "Were you born there?"

"No, I grew up in Minnesota." His tone was absent-minded, though still vaguely contemptuous. Armand did not mind. He was a simple man. He chose not to dwell too long on the inherent unethics of charging admission to a departed woman's memory. He was paying nothing in upkeep for the place! And where was this fellow Henry to be so sneerful? What did he expect with such stolen goods?

"Monsieur Henry, I think we can come to an arrangement."

In the end, Henry took the dress. They always take the dress. And after the two of them visited a local memory transfer center, Armand brought out a new dress, incensed it with her perfume, and sat back in his office and remembered seeing New York for the first time.