Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Iron Lass: “I never sought glory. Basic respect would suffice.”

Iconditional Love

Blobs of Day-Glo color oozed and swirled around me as if I were standing inside a giant lava lamp, and the air smelled like a mixture of bubble gum and the cosmetics department at a Target store.

“So, Syndi,” I asked the only other person with me inside the Id-Smasher®’s neuroscape, “how do you feel about the F*L*A*C ordering you into counseling?”

“Like, as far as I’m concerned,” said the young pop star, once again and in quick succession yawning, stretching, snapping her virtual gum, and rolling her eyes, “everybody should be in counseling.”

Power Grrrl had manifested from her memories the leather sofa from my Verbalarium and had draped herself across it, her back wedged into one of its corners, one thigh hiked up over the sofa’s arm, her hair dazzled along the sofa’s back as if she were awaiting her paparazzi. Mentally clad in black-and-silver leather dominatrix garb and swaying her torso to the dance beat seeping from her bustier-speakers, she was, that day, unusually low-key.

“Tell me about that, Syndi. Why should ‘everybody be in counseling’?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Eva? These F*O*O*J-feebletons really need you, and one day I’m sure, like, they’ll thank you?” she said in her usual question-intonation, smiling sugar all over me. “But just look at the world, you know? Everyone’s, like, crazy—all this negative energy they’re beaming? These F*O*O*J-fogies need to fix themselves before they start invading everyone else’s proximity, you know? Gawd!”

“So you think they’re being hypocritical, Syndi?”

“Like, yeah!”

“Aren’t superheroes supposed to be involved? Helping others?”

“How’re you supposed to help people if you should really be under round-the-clock observation on a coupla hundred meds?”

“You seem to get along fine with the Brotherfly.”

“P-Fly? He’s cool,” she said, while behind her drifted an image of the Brotherfly gazing at her adoringly. “He knows how to have fun. He’s not afraid to live, y’know? The others, like, need to get over themselves. ‘Legendary heroes’? Right!”

“Not even Omnipotent Man?”

Brotherfly disappeared, replaced by an Omnipotent Man half his correct size, and old beyond his years. “Just a sad old man who’s, like, totally lost in his own rep.”

“The Flying Squirrel?”

Omnipotent Man disappeared, replaced by the image of an actual flying squirrel wearing a black top hat sitting atop a pile of virtual money and screeching. “Just an angry old tightass who can’t deal.”

“Deal with…?”

“My orientation?”

“Yes. Let’s discuss that momentarily. And X-Man?”

She paused a moment with a look on her face that suggested she was chewing a uniquely dreadful species of sushi. The top-hatted squirrel was replaced, oddly, by an image of herself wearing a white shirt, black suit, and tie. The image appeared to be gasping for breath before it disintegrated.

“Gawd,” she said, “he’s, like, the most uptight of all of them. Everything’s about race for him. He seriously needs your help, Eva. Like, if he didn’t have his job and his politics and his religion, he wouldn’t even have an identity!”

“And how about Iron Lass?”

She stopped her sofa-swaying, looking at me for the first time, while above us towered a giant, rusting iron-fleshed Iron Lass like a Norse Statue of Liberty, glowering down from the clouds with such intense disappointment that the virtual ground beneath us split open.

Rolling her eyes, Syndi blew a bubble. Made it larger.

Larger still.

Popped it.

She sucked it back inside her mouth and chewed.

She rotated the twin volume knobs on each cup of her bustier. The thump-bump pumped louder, and only then did I recognize the song—one of her hits from the previous summer: “Thong Power.”

“She’s just a depressed, tired, worn-out, broken old woman, Eva,” said Syndi, getting up from the couch and amble-dancing around the discotheque that had sprung up around us to shield us from the iron giantess. Syndi glanced at numerous mirrors and portraits of herself, then examined objets d’art and bookshelves her memory had manifested here from my office. She pulled books halfway out of their slots on my shelves, glancing at them before leaving them.

“She’s always daggering me with her eyes, always making these, like, snide remarks about how I dress, about my relationships with, like, Cathode Girl and Billi Biceps and Beast Mistress…saying I don’t have any focus or purpose or direction…I mean, who does she think she is? My, like, mother?” She snorted. “I already have one of those, and she supports me every step of the way!”

Beside her, a full-size Bianca appeared, a woman in her late forties, overtanned and leather-skinned, wearing a bustier and white pants that would be called chic on a woman two decades younger.

“Yes, I remember after that openmouthed kiss with Media Medea on the Golden Tunic Awards on ABC. There was a lot of controversy. Your mother backed you completely.”

“Yeah. Bianca’s cool,” she beamed.

“You call your mother by her first name?”

“Like, why not? We’re not hung up with society’s ‘rules.’ Plus she’s like not only my best friend, she’s my agent. She got me into the F*O*O*J, got me my Sony deal. If old Iron Ass wants to be someone’s mother, maybe she should start with her own kids?” My bookshelves disappeared, replaced by a floating array of gold and platinum records—Syndi’s, I assumed. “I hear neither of them even talk with her…I even heard one of her kids even tried to like kill herself or something? Some role model. Iron Gash could like learn something from Bianca. Gawd! I hope you can help her out…for her kids’ sake, if no one else’s.”

“I noticed, in the simulation against CycloTron, you and Iron Lass certainly seemed to clash. And you never speak to each other in front of me.”

“Like, I just told you? She hates me.”

“Well, Syndi, I’ve certainly never gotten the impression she—”

“No, she hates me, Eva, I’m telling you?”

“Don’t you think you might exag—”

“She disapproves of me intensely, then? Happy now?”

“What’s interesting to me is how much you two are alike.”

She spun back around to face me.

“You