The Inside-Out Man, Part 1
A disturbing disturbance.
Welcome to Olympus City, where super-powers, physics-defying tech, and unearthly creatures are all possible now. Human nature, however, remains unchanged.
No one is born a perfect superhero, but a few strive to live up to the ideal anyway.
Part 1
No one was home when Miranda returned to the apartment. Normally, the absence of a telepathic roommate relieved her. Now, however, she wanted to tell Alyssa about her trip to their hometown—she didn’t want Alyssa to read her mind and automatically know all about it, but she would have welcomed an old-fashioned, out-loud conversation. Alyssa had taken her own trip home several weeks earlier, and they never did catch up afterward.
The refrigerator’s humming filled the meager square footage while a next-door neighbor added occasional soft percussion. Otherwise, silence. These days, silence was so unusual that it unnerved her. It wouldn’t last, though; couldn’t possibly. So, Miranda figured she might as well enjoy it.
She crashed on the couch, indulging in a brief rest after her cross-country direct flight. She wasn’t actually tired, but a few thousand miles of non-stop self-propelled flying should have worn her out.
The respite lasted an entire minute.
Sirens bled through the windows and lured Miranda off the couch. She opened one and poked her head out. Her street was business as usual, with scattered pedestrians and moderate vehicular traffic rolling along a single direction. The sirens softened, pointing the way to the disturbance.
Miranda permitted herself a final indulgence, one more deep breath. Then, faster than anyone could have seen, she switched into her Ultra Woman costume and dove out the window. Anyone who happened to glance up would have seen a momentary spot and mistaken it for blurry vision, easily corrected with a blink or two.
Wind rushing against her face, Miranda glided over the street and wove between buildings until she was soaring above a cluster of police cars, where a masked man was already soaring, gray cape flapping behind him. He was a friendly masked man, though.
“Welcome back,” Ken said as Miranda pulled up alongside him.
“Looks like quite a welcome.” She pointed at the flashing lights below. “What’s this all about?”
“No idea. If you want to go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”
No, Miranda did not want to rush on ahead into some unknown, dangerous situation. But she did. She hoped it was someone like Clodhopper Lummox, whom Ultra Woman and Mr. Amazing could dispatch with minimal fuss. Or perhaps Paper Cut—he tended to fold easily.
If only.
Miranda stopped short upon locating the incident. She would have cried out in horror if she wasn’t in costume.
The street was inside out. Half a city block, everything and everyone between the sidewalks—inside out.
Each car had unfolded and refolded around itself so that seats surrounded the hood and the engine’s innards hung out for all to see while the contents of the trunk did the same. Coolant fluid enveloped its container, the spare tire was reversed, and shopping bags exposed various purchases, each similarly inverted.
The people, however, were in far worse shape. They were a nightmare.
Muscles were stuffed inside puffed-up skeletons, around which various no-longer-internal organs orbited. Their brains stretched and wrapped around their skulls while miniature bolts of electricity sparked around their heads. They all shambled about blindly, groping for lifelines, any screams lost within their folded-in faces. Miranda wanted to scream on their behalf.
One person was neither shambling nor groping. This individual trudged straight down the middle of the street, seemingly unbothered by his inverted condition. This Inside-Out Man was minding his own business as he walked against the flow of traffic, which obliged him by folding out of his way.
The inversion effect followed him. Everyone snapped back to normal once the Inside-Out Man had gotten far enough ahead, and they showed no evidence of physical damage, just an abundance of shock as they recovered from this existential blender.
Ahead, people abandoned their vehicles and fled to the sidewalks. Miranda landed between two vacated cars in the man’s path, maintaining triple the distance she normally would have.
“Hi,” she called out. “Can you talk?”
The Inside-Out Man stopped. “Yes.” He sounded unsure of himself. “It hurts.”
“Speaking hurts?”
“Everything.”
Watching the blood pump around the interior of his heart, Miranda believed it. She resisted every impulse to look away.
Ken touched down beside her, a hushed “Dear God” slipping through his full-face mask. The police sirens blared in the background, stuck in traffic somewhere down the street. They no doubt would have let the superheroes take point on this one anyway.
“Let’s get you to Hephaestus Enterprises,” Miranda said in her kindest voice, not wanting to judge the man on his monstrous appearance or even the monstrous effects he radiated. He gave no evidence of doing any of this deliberately. “They may be able to help you.”
As she talked, Ken floated to the sidewalk. He telekinetically, and carefully, moved the affected people out of range. Once in the clear, they each reformed, though some would have collapsed if Ken hadn’t caught them.
“That’s where I was. I think.” A floating larynx projected a distorted but intelligible voice, its direction ever shifting. “For a long time. Felt long.”
Organs, bones, muscles, fat, and skin slid around each other, pulling apart and reassembling. Sort of like puzzle pieces.
No. Please no … “Mr. Neal?” Miranda asked.
“Ollie. Yes, Ollie Neal.”
Last time Miranda saw him, Ollie Neal was a jigsaw puzzle. Before that, he was supposed to take over as the managing director of the Aeschylus Theatre, but the previous managing director couldn’t tolerate the insult to his professional honor. So, Bart Bloman stole his brother’s only-in-Olympus invention and adopted the name Puzzler. He transformed Ollie into thousands of disassembled puzzle pieces and destroyed just enough of them to impede his restoration. Miranda had come so close to saving him.
“I’ll help you back to the lab,” she offered.
“Can’t help me. They didn’t. Some of me is still missing. It’s his fault—Bloman. He did this.”
“You don’t have to worry about him.” Miranda strove to be as calm and reassuring as possible while trying not to look directly at any organ for too long. “He’s in prison—convicted and locked up in Argus Max. We won’t be seeing him for decades.”
“Argus Max?” Extra electricity sparked across the exposed brain.
“Yes. You’re safe from him. Everyone is.”
“Argus Max. Thank you.”
Ollie strode forth as more cars unfolded around him. Miranda held her hands up and out, suddenly cast as the world’s most ineffectual crossing guard.
“Hold on. You’re not—”
“Yes.” Ollie lumbered toward her. “Argus Max.”
Hands still raised, Miranda took a step back. “No, no, no. You don’t have to do that. He doesn’t have any powers. He’s just a guy.”
“Not just.”
Ken hurdled the dismantled vehicles. Floating overhead, he reached toward Ollie, then pulled back, a telekinetic pantomime of yanking him away.
The telekinesis merely jostled Ollie, whose brain wriggled as his skull angled upward.
And Ken unraveled.
His whole body turned to ribbon as he came apart. He didn’t utter a single sound; Miranda wasn’t sure he could. Various pieces of him swirled in the air, a sort of tangled somersault.
“Stop it!” she shouted. “Just stop!”
Ollie did not stop. Ken did not reform. Every second Miranda’s feet remained rooted to the pavement, her friend’s suffering continued.
Speed. I’ve got speed. I can do this.
One good super-fast, super-strong shove—all she needed. Miranda rushed at Ollie.
She couldn’t even get within arm’s reach. Her hands split apart, fingers and thumbs popping off while the muscles and skin switched places and the bones extracted themselves. It was hell in the form of an anatomical diagram. The individual components all tugged on each other, rejecting the separation but failing to reattach.
The effect spread, every piece of her coming apart, losing track of one another, dividing and inverting. Her only solace was that no one heard her scream.