“
We are?” Wrath asked. “You didn’t even talk to him!”
“
I don’t need to.”
“
Did you do something?”
Hyperman hit him with a sharp glare. “I’m always doing something,” he said. “I’m always doing something more than you can imagine.”
“
What did you do?” Wrath asked, jerking his head sideways to peer in at El Dorado. “What?”
Without answering, Hyperman blurred out of the Quarry and off into the dust-choked Martian sky. Behind him, he still heard Wrath shouting after him, “WHAT?”
***
Hyperman hung in the air outside of Mors’s top floor office. The afternoon light glared off the green glass windows all about him. A breeze howled past, and a commercial plane noisily rumbled by above.
Inside, Mors pressed a stout, blonde-haired man in a ruffled suit up against his desk and roughly kissed him. With a loopy grin, Mors sank down and started to unbuckle his friend’s belt. Moaning, the blonde man dreamily tilted his head back. Upon noticing Hyperman floating around outside, his half-closed eyes exploded open.
“
Um…um…Alex?” he said and pointed.
Mors turned his head and gave a start.
Hyperman couldn’t help but grin. This was the first time he’d ever caught Mors in such a compromising position, and it certainly wasn’t the compromising position he’d ever imagined to find him in.
After pausing and taking a breath, Mors tried to look unfazed. He calmly re-fastened the blonde man’s belt and fixed his tie for him. Mors then stood up straight and tucked his shirt in before brushing his knotty, unruly hair out of his face. He offered his friend a hand and led him over to the elevator.
“
To be continued,” he said, running a delicate finger down the man’s chest.
The blonde man nodded and shuffled nervously backwards into the elevator, unable to look away from Hyperman. The doors chopped shut on him and his nervous, bulging eyes.
Mors padded gracefully over to his desk and leaned back against it, crossing one leg over the other and folding his hands together. He wore all oceanic blue with a wide, open-collared shirt. His rolled-up sleeves exposed his tanned, hairy forearms.
Hyperman levitated down into the office. A wicked half-smile curved up his mouth.
“
Sorry for interrupting,” he said.
“
I’m sure you had good reason,” Mors testily replied. Hyperman noted the slight tremor coursing throughout his normally calm and composed body. He almost laughed.
“
I can’t help but wonder if you actually wanted me to interrupt,” Hyperman said. “You knew I was watching.”
Mors’s entire face twitched. “I beg your pardon?”
“
With my hyper-vision. I told you I’d be watching all your company’s operations. That I’d be looking for any wrongdoing.”
“
But this…this wasn’t wrong! It was something private!”
“
You thought I wouldn’t be paying attention to your office?”
“
I…I…”
“
Have done this before and I never noticed? How do you know that? I can see everything, Alex. You know that. In fact, I wonder if you like being watched. Maybe you just like being watched by me.”
“
No! Of course not!”
“
Yes, you wanted to be seen. You wanted to be caught. You want me to judge you. You want to know if I approve of what you are. You want to know if you can still be saved.”
“
What?” Mors asked, clearly bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“
I spoke with Rogelio Espinoza Perez,” Hyperman said. “Mutagen told me everything, Alex.”
“
I-I-I helped equip the Science Police Squad to capture that menace!” Mors replied, fumbling back around his desk and rifling through some papers. “I’ve been working on a cure for his condition. For years, I have! I swear. I…I don’t think there’s anything more to it!”
“
I cured him, Alex. I saved him.”
“
That’s…that’s astounding!”
Hyperman rolled his eyes. “Is that praise, Alex? Or a prayer? Tell me, did you ever pray for me to make Mutagen better?”
He super-sped right up into Mors’s face.
“
Did you?” Hyperman asked.
Their abrupt closeness sent Mors stumbling and crashing awkwardly back down to the floor. He shakily mounted up to his knees and cradled his hands together. Pleadingly, he held them up toward Hyperman.
“
It’s…it’s not what you think!” he said.
Hyperman floated up over him, gazing down balefully in judgment of him like an angry, apocalyptic god. His face darkened, and his eyes lit up with angry divine-blue fire.
“
What is it then?” he asked.
“
I thought I was doing my duty!” Mors cried out, his voice cracking. Tears swabbed down his face. “My holy obligation!”
“
Creating monsters to kill me was your holy obligation? Me? Your lord and savior? Endangering the people I protect? That was your duty?”
“
I had to! I had to create menaces and monsters for you to fight! For you to save people from! By doing so, you saved their souls! Over and over again! In that way, all our sins are forgiven!”
Hyperman shook his head. “You’re insane. That tumor actually did destroy your mind.”
“
I was only trying to help everyone!” Mors said. “And you as well! In this physical incarnation, you don’t understand everything you are and everything you can do! You needed a nemesis to push you and improve you! To awaken you to all of your power! Yes, I know I’m your Judas, but someone had to be!”
Hyperman chuckled. “I can’t believe you of all people buy into this nonsense that I’m divine.”
“
I’ve read all the scriptures!” Mors replied. “I’ve done calculations! It all adds up! We have proof too! We know where you come from and why you are what you are! I can show you!”
The words hit Hyperman like a super-strong punch to the gut. In a blur of motion, he grabbed Mors and swept out into the sky with him. He held him dangling out above New Daedalus, letting him look down at all the tall, majestic buildings and little ant-like people below. Mors squirmed and gasped in his grip.
“
If you’re lying,” Hyperman said, his eyes burning, “I’ll burn you to atoms.”
Mors gulped and nodded.
“
Now show me where I come from,” Hyperman said.
***
The elevator shot down below the MorsWorld Building’s sub-basements deep into the earth. Its doors clanged open, and a long shaft led to a pair of bolted, titanium super-steel doors. Hyperman scanned and studied them. With their strength and size, he thought even he’d have trouble prying them open.
His hyper-vision looked through the walls and saw a large number of Diatomite-x bombs primed to go off inside of them. There were enough explosives to put a sizable hole in the planet. The same super-strong metal making up the doors lined the walls and kept radiation from leaking out.
“
You’ve noticed our emergency security measures, I assume?” Mors asked, gliding down the corridor ahead of Hyperman.
“
You were so afraid of me finding this place that you were willing to blow up the entire East Coast to keep me from seeing what’s down here?” Hyperman asked.
“
We wanted to keep this place safe from everyone, not just you. We’re holding the secret truth of the ages down here and can’t allow the wrong person to find out. We were only hiding this from you before because we thought you weren’t ready, but you might be now. You’re asking the right questions and have a need to know.”
Mors paused at a panel near the doors and pressed both his palms against a scanner for a DNA print. He then dialed in answers for a complex, ever-changing series of riddles and math problems that each needed to be solved in less than five seconds. Once he was finally done, the doors snapped open.
Following Mors through, Hyperman kept watching, scanning, and listening. He wanted to be aware of his surroundings and know exactly what he was getting into at all times here. If there were a trap waiting to be sprung, he’d be ready.
Mors gestured toward a shimmering, whirlpooling blue inter-dimensional gateway. Hyperman had seen enough of them to know one when he saw it. The gateway itself seeped mist and heat. Condensation dripped down the dull black walls surrounding it.
“
I’ll go first,” Mors said, “just to show you I’m not trying to pull anything.”
Without hesitation, he stepped right through. The gateway made a slurping sound. His body flickered photonegative black and white before vanishing. Hyperman paused and looked over the gateway. He knew he shouldn’t worry. No matter how dangerous this could be, he’d be fine. He was Hyperman, after all. So he strode right through.
Energy lashed over him and made his invulnerable skin itch. Black, blue, and white dazzled and flashed everywhere before he stumbled on through to the other side. A circular chamber with a tall, arching ceiling expanded out before him. Glass cases full of preserved scriptures, prophesies, and mathematics lined the wide, winding walls. At the center of everything, a strange, diamond-shaped, and intricately designed spacecraft sat mounted on a raised platform.
The vessel was about the size of a small boat and could probably only fit two or three people inside. It glittered sharp black with small blue, green, and violet stars speckled across its many, many facets. Blunted diamond crystals stuck out from all over the craft, poking in and out, swiveling open and closed.
Hyperman thought the spacecraft looked somehow familiar, as if he’d stumbled upon it before in a half-remembered dream or past life. He seemed drawn to it almost magnetically. Spellbound, he drifted toward it, reaching out to caress its cold, sticky surface. He felt hot, dry breath exhaling out from it and focused his hyper-vision. The craft actually had pores scattered throughout its skin! It was breathing! It was alive! Its aura even glowed a smoky, life-giving green.
He X-rayed the whole thing. The vessel’s internal computers and circuitry had grown from the ship’s coarse, flabby, wet flesh. Massive lungs, beating hearts, quivering intestines, thorny blood vessels, clumpy brain tissue, and electrically hot nerves also crammed in together around the ship’s machinery. A womb filled with thick, sloppy, healthy-smelling fluid even hung in the center of all the organs and organic metal.
It was all unearthly and utterly magnificent.
“
Where are we?” Hyperman whispered, awed and somewhat hesitant to raise his voice. “What is this?”
“
We’re on a small space station orbiting a barren moon in a galaxy only I know about,” Mors said, stepping up from around the ship. Hyperman hadn’t even known he was there. “As for what this is,” Mors added, “I suppose you could call it your father, mother, and home all wrapped up into one.”
Just looking at the ship made it difficult for Hyperman to concentrate on anything else. His hyper-senses soaked up the ambient energy waves radiating off of its skin, which nourished and numbed him in an odd but pleasurable way.
“
Our people found the ship drifting through the Andromeda galaxy decades ago,” Mors said. “It took years to thoroughly examine it and get into its systems. The data it contained was quite overwhelming.”
“
What did it say?” Hyperman asked, basking in the ship’s glow.
“
In the beginning of our reality, when two other universes collided and formed ours, the excess space-time hardened into this ship,” Mors replied. “It is self-aware, but in a way neither of us can completely understand. It is the universe’s heart and soul, but even those words fail to explain what it is completely. It grew you from all the chaotic matter and energy that flared up from the Big Bang. It spent centuries nurturing you and calculating the precise and most effective time to birth you and send you out amongst the cosmos and chaos. You were life before life and life beyond life. You embody the universe and the ship is the tendril that connects you to it. You were born to save us all. You save our lives and souls and carry the essence of us all with you. That way when this universe sacrifices itself to help birth a new universe, you’ll carry us with you when ascending into a higher and better reality. Using the collective knowledge and power of so many peoples inside you, you’ll help create and birth the new universe and make it a paradise for us all.”