CHAPTER TWO

Many people had tried to escape from themselves, but he was the first one to succeed.

It was common to confuse "life" with "humanity". Though all humans were living beings, not all living beings were humans. For instance: "It's life, that's the way it is", a popular retort to legitimate criticism, wasn't really that accurate. That was the way human life was. There were many emotionally-wounded veterans of society--Bruce Banner among them--who didn't have a problem with life, they had a problem with people. Some were confident that, if you took everyone else out of the equation, life would be just fine. All they wanted was to be left alone. But they felt limited to two undesireable options…to continue trying, in the form of "life", or to give up, in the form of suicide. But why not keep trying as something other than human, if that's not working out for you? Why let one style of life ruin the whole concept?

In a lab in San Francisco, a metamorphosis was taking place. Eric Del Rio's cocoon had evolved: the crystal mound that had attached itself to the floor was now alive with colors normally not visible under a yellow sun. Power-soaking tendrils had shot out of it in every direction--they were thorny, the tinge of texture of ground-up glass, biting into the ceiling and walls and creating a treacherous, three-dimensional web. A bracing, silent hum washed up against countertops and cabinets forcefully. Coordinating all of this, a network of pencil-thin, wispy lasers created bizarre grids in the crystal's outer shell. Inside, an off-white lump (which, judging by the contours, might once have been a man curled in a fetal position) was backlit. Organic-looking tubes connected it to the crystal. Electricity was consistently drained via the tendrils, feeding both him and his process.

In his last few moments as a human being, Eric had thought about game shows, oddly enough. He'd always hated watching them. There would often come a point where the contestant would have the chance to take his or her winnings and leave, or risk them for more. Eric would mentally scream at the TV, telling them to quit while they were ahead--even if they did end up winning more, the tension and the pressure wouldn't be worth it. A lot of things were that way. He could probably get a girlfriend, but did he really want to go through all the mindgames and all the effort? There were so many idols that America put up on pedestals, things that everyone was supposed to want--but Eric doubted that they'd make him feel better about all the crap he'd have gone through to get them. Success was overrated. Happiness that was based on external circumstances like relationships and a career was overrated. (The belief that the inside was more important than the outside was well-accepted, but why did people who abandoned the outside by being antisocial and apathetic about certain things get treated like lunatics?)

Though he'd never have admitted it, Eric believed that there were two kinds of people: the kind that had what it took to get through life, and the kind that didn't; and no amount of work could fix those who fell in the latter category. The rest of his family were the former. His mother, a celebrated anthropologist, had become an expert on the effects of "unwilling isolationism", using the cultures of the Savage Land as an example. (Their Antarctic jungle paradise was walled in by ice, and being trapped there had produced some interesting social and psychological traits.) His father was a radical mathematician who, among other things, acted as the UN's algorithm expert and ran around Europe with women a third of his age. His brother was a famous countercultural author, he flourished in bizarre genres such as political horror and alternate history/ancient African sci-fi that revolved around the Mirrored Jungle and the world-ruling empire that originally grew out of the continent. His older sister (Paula) wrote books about psychology and worked on high-profile cases as a profiler and interviewer, while his younger (half-) sister was a harpist who'd played with many orchestras.

It was easy, for them. Natural. He knew that it wasn't just his imagination or insecurity--he'd grown up with them, seen how they operated and dealt with things. They were articulate, stylish geniuses that couldn't help but be popular. Meanwhile, Eric couldn't stop from screwing up. They'd always made excuses for him, and though he appreciated their intentions, it was a painful thing to sit through. He was a "late bloomer". He just needed to find his niche. He was going through a rough patch. Every failed relationship, every failed experiment, they bent over backwards to assure him that it wasn't his fault. But he knew better. There was a reason why he hadn't managed to stay on the same project or keep the same major for more than a year--a reason why he hadn't had his first real girlfriend until he was twenty-four. The others had brought home good news in the form of education/job opportunities and significant others when they were in their early teens.

But he was a Del Rio, and that was something of a guarantee that you'd have at least one brilliant, world-shattering idea in your lifetime. After developing and rejecting many inferior, prototypical theories and methods, he'd managed to synthesize a substance that could become anything, whether it was organic or inorganic. Chemicals, DNA, gas, liquid, rock, metal, plants. It was the ultimate blank slate, a sort of clay-like property that shapeshifted on every possible level. With it, one could fashion superhuman biological systems and new elements. He'd created it with the intention of selling it--and finally coming into his own--but, as with many parents, he found that he didn't want to let go. He realized that he didn't want any part of this kind of world…no, the clay would be his ticket out of it.

The plan had come to him immediately, like he'd always had the general idea in the back of his mind, and he'd just been waiting for an excuse to use it. First (and most importantly), he'd stop being human. There was a time to keep trying to make something work, and a time to give up--while others had trouble telling the difference, Eric never had. He knew he could find a way to use the clay to create a new self. It turned out that it would be easiest to let the clay assimilate into his body and transform it from the inside out. From that point, he could be anything. He wouldn't be trapped with his old limitations and weaknesses. The logic was quite clear to him: he was the problem, and if he wasn't himself, the problem would be gone.

But it had never been enough to just become something else…he wanted to unlearn humanity completely. He wanted to forget all of the pain of his experiences. The new creature he was transforming into had senses that could tap into all of reality, from the lowest subdimensions to the highest levels where matter was obsolete and consciousness and energy became one--the power and intensity of what he'd taken in, in these last few hours, was enough to make him literally forget the previous twenty-some years. There was just no comparison. Brand-new senses (which hadn't existed until he'd used his new form to invent them) enabled him to take in the full scope of this universe and the universes beyond. He had windows into a billion different worlds and a billion different realms, how could he hold onto the memory of a place that he didn't want to remember in the first place?

What had once been Eric saw a picture of life that was free of humanity. There were magnetic oceans coursing through the planet and the sky and the atmosphere, beautiful microscopic environments being born, spreading, and dying within the same pico-second, and never-discovered plants that revealed their elaborate chemical blueprints to him. He was able to reach out and feel data-streams being broadcast by other galaxies and other dimensions. The buried skeletons of the world were ripe with sensation and information. Nothing was too faint or too far away, he even saw the history of the land mapped out by fault lines and tectonic shifts, ancient molecular traces of deserts and seas and ice ages. The full spectrum of light nearly blinded him. All of his life, he'd tried to close himself off from the world, for his own protection--but now, he'd discovered a parallel level where he was safe from people, and he wanted to feel all of it.

Eric couldn't remember his name, his family, or anything about himself or the world he'd once lived in. He understood that there were oxygen-breathing lifeforms covering the planet he was currently on--but they were so far down on the food chain of phenomena he was now experiencing, he didn't really notice them. Every few minutes, he discovered more about science (watching it unfold in ways virtually no one else could see) than even geniuses learned in a lifetime. He was happy. And then, he saw it: an unpopulated dimension. It was a chaos-storm, a place made uninhabitable by its skewed, lethal laws of physics. Cosmic lightning fried anything that dared to move; there were none of the elements necessary for any normal organism's survival. He very much wanted to go there. It was the solitude he'd always wanted…all he had to do was find a way. In his mind, he saw the device he'd need to create to access it. And he had a lot to work with. Yes, there were technological resources all around him; he could feel them.

His time was coming. Once the transformation was complete, he'd get what he needed to leave once and for all, and he wouldn't let anything stop him.

Of all of the words that had been (relatively) recently coined, "tamper-proof" was General Sean McGregory's personal favorite. He loved the idea that you could construct something and then ensure that its purpose would be fulfilled--to guarantee that it wouldn't be broken or disrupted or misused. Though it was a new word, it was far from a new idea. The Founding Fathers of America had seen how other nations and empires had failed to survive the death of their creators…so, they'd created some legal failsafes. As far as McGregory was concerned, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were strokes of genius--a solid, untouchable core of ideals, surrounded by an adaptable framework, as they'd realized that flexibility might come in handy, occasionally. (As a black man, he was quite grateful that they'd arranged for the possibility of modifications.) It left room for improvements, but it didn't leave much room to screw up that badly. And it was from the founders that McGregory had found his inspiration for an idea that could change America forever.

Within H-1's secret Colorado base, several hundred soldiers, scientists, and other specialists were trying to accomplish two Herculean tasks: figuring out how to outsmart Bruce Banner and overpower the Hulk. They'd been throwing tens of millions at the challenge every year, with no real results. Morale had been low for some time--they obviously hadn't caught him--but their new commanding officer looked very promising. McGregory was making some final changes to his newly-set-up office. It was a wide and wide-open room, with off-white paint and dark grey carpeting. There was a tall bookcase that was full of tomes on history and warfare and strategy and civilization, with some of the volumes having been written by elite military experts. (Those had only been read by a few dozen people at the most, as they contained lessons learned from top-secret battles.) His desk was a half-circle of black metal; nothing but a laptop, some file-folders, a phone with an intercom, and a tiny American flag were on top of it. There were viewscreens built into the walls and leather chairs for guests.

Overall, it was too ostentatious for him--he would've been happy with something the size of a broom closet, to free up space for more important things like troop quarters and storage--but, given the importance of his new post, he supposed that it was fitting. There was only one last touch to make, in order for this to be his new home. A thin metal briefcase sat upright under his desk, he picked it up and set it on the reflective black surface. After doing what was necessary to unlock it, he opened it and examined the contents. A crimson and navy uniform was inside--a specially-made bodysuit that looked like kevlar, but was much more advanced. There were a few parts of it that were white: bands around the wrists and ankles, the lenses in the facemask, and the belt, which held (among other things) a gun that fired concentrated plasma. A circle of white stars was in one upper corner of the shirt, like the first version of the flag. Aside from a few living witnesses, this was the only proof that he'd ever been involved with the Super-Soldier Directive.

FDR had founded the organization on the dawn of America's entry into World War II. In the highest circles of government, it was clearly understood that a new way of thinking was necessary--with the superhuman surge that was the Golden Age, they realized that they needed to get on the bandwagon. But aside from their first project (Captain America, of course), they didn't have much success. They couldn't re-create the serum, they had trouble finding trustworthy candidates, and there was much infighting over which direction they should go, especially after Captain America seemed to die. Should the organization be disbanded, now that the Nazi menace was gone? Or should they move on to attacking communists and whoever came next? It was decided that there was a reason FDR had called it a directive: they weren't just a part of the government, they'd been quite literally directed to come up with knights for this North American Camelot. Until they achieved that, they couldn't stop.

The project's fortunes had waxed and waned since then--sometimes it would have its funding cut for years at a time, sometimes it would be hijacked by someone trying to use it for political or capitalistic purposes--but McGregory believed that it was desperately necessary. Unlike other military leaders, he wasn't paranoid about superheroes (he greatly respected the sacrifices and effort they'd made), but he didn't want to rely on volunteer vigilantes forever. That was too dangerous for the American people. They needed to guarantee that there'd always be superhuman guardians around. The country was still something of a social experiment; a work-in-progress devoted to seeing what happened when government limited its power and theoretically let the people steer the ship. Though he wasn't a scientist, McGregory knew that experiments needed to be carried out in secure conditions, or else the outcome would be tainted.

If McGregory would have been able to fully express his love and appreciation of America, he would have made a great politician and one of the greatest Presidents in the history of the nation. But he wasn't that kind of person. He showed his feelings through actions, not words--he'd given over twenty years of his life to his country. Unfortunately, he'd never gotten the opportunity to wear the costume he had in the briefcase. He'd worn another one--similar, but black and nondescript, as you didn't advertise who sent you when doing covert ops. Though he'd worked in a very morally-complex environment, he'd kept his honor. (He was a Marine, after all.) He'd never killed any innocent people. He'd never killed anyone without first warning them, unless an innocent life was in immediate danger. Everything he'd done had protected the security of America and/or other countries. They'd tried to get him to do things he wasn't comfortable with, but he'd offered to resign on the spot--and he was so good that they didn't want to lose him.

It pained him to see the Super-Soldier Directive not being all that it could be. Currently, it was sometimes corrupt and sometimes plain incompetent. It was being used only for covert work. He understood the need for secrecy, but it had so much more to offer. They just couldn't seem to grasp why Captain America had been (and still was) so effective. It wasn't the science or the training…it was the fact that he had credibility and integrity. McGregory dreamed of the Super-Soldier Directive being a flagship for the military, an ethically-run organization that would strengthen the country and restore its good image around the world. People would point to it as a gift that America had given--something used both for self-defense and selfless international aid. And, in the same vein as the tamperproof template that the Founding Fathers had provided, he'd make it virtually impossible to misuse. He had a very specific structure in mind. Even after he was gone, it would be immune from both opportunistic politicians and selfish, agenda-possessing generals.

Since being promoted and trading face-to-face combat for something more impersonal, he'd worked his way up the ladder, proving people wrong about him and doing things that weren't supposed to be possible. The Hulk was the latest in a long line of seemingly-impossible challenges. With his capture under his belt, he'd be in a position to take over the Super-Soldier Directive and give both America and the world a new beacon of hope. In his youth, he'd hoped for more obvious success--a chance to put on the red, white and blue uniform and save the world on live TV--but he knew that he could do something just as important, if less photogenic. McGregory closed the briefcase, walked over to a wall of flatscreen monitors, and reached under the edge of one with his fingertips. It swung open. After hitting the code for his private safe, he slid the case in, and then locked everything up. The superhuman part of him would be staying in hibernation, for the moment.

After straightening his dress blues, the intercom on his desk buzzed at him. He walked over and hit the button.

"Lieutenant Chang is here to see you, sir."

"Send him in."

Less than a minute later, a trim, thirtysomething Asian-American man in an Army uniform was trekking across the room's considerable floor space. They exchanged a casual salute, and then shook hands.

"How are you doing, Paul?"

"I'm good, you?"

"I'm great."

Sean offered him a seat on the other side of his desk, and then went to sit in his overstuffed chair.

Paul took a look around the room, impressed. "Somebody's moving up in the world. You didn't fly me all the way out here just to rub in the fact that a Marine took over H-1 from an Army man like myself, did you?"

"I was tempted to, but I held back."

"That's always nice."

"As usual, I need your expertise. Our psych-ops people requested reassignment back when Ross was still in charge."

"I figured that was what you had in mind."

"Are you up for it?"

"I've done some consulting for H-1. They wanted to cover their bases by having multiple profiles, a few years back."

"What were your impressions?"

"Banner is the poster boy for every mental issue that someone can have, practically. I'm talking about passive-aggressive, self-absorbed, repressed and depressed and--"

"I'm sorry, I should've been more specific. I've read all of the material on Banner--and god, there's a lot of it--but I was actually referring to the Hulk."

"Ross was never that interested in the Hulk's feelings," Paul chuckled. "He thought of him as a mindless killing machine."

"Except he isn't."

"Yeah, but if you tried to suggest that to Ross, you'd get your head bitten off."

"I want H-1 to be as objective and thorough as possible, so I'd like to hear your thoughts."

"We're talking about the standard green Hulk, right? Because some of them have different personalities."

"Yes."

Paul considered it, and then tried to find a place to begin. "Give me just a few seconds--I'm sorry, I'm not much of an impromptu person. I'm used to having weeks to write a report."

"Well, let's start with the basics…he's antisocial, isn't he?"

"To say the least, yeah. That's one of the few things that inspires him to actually try to communicate with lowly humans…when he says something, it's usually about how he just wants everyone to leave him alone."

"He's stuck pretty closely to the desert, over the years. Is it because he's trying to get away from everyone?"

"That, and, I think he feels less threatened by desolation. This is hard to explain, but it's--it's easier for him to be the biggest thing around in a desert, as opposed to a city. That could be Banner leaking through. Some depressed people function a lot better in bleak surroundings, as opposed to bright places filled with lots of happy people. It's half-envy, half-insecurity."

"Would you say that he hates people?"

"On some level, definitely. That's one thing that he and Banner have in common. I don't know whether it's personal or not, they just don't--they just can't--"

"I know what you mean."

"But would he go out of his way to hurt people? Unless he's in savage mode, no. He doesn't go looking for trouble, he just acts in what he perceives as self-defense. People obviously get hurt or killed in the process, but in his mind, that isn't usually his goal. Can I use a bad example?"

"Sure."

"Let's say that there was a group of people you felt were antagonizing you--some of them were even violent. When fighting back, how considerate would you be of those who weren't violent?"

"I wouldn't specifically go after them, but if I had to go through them to get to the main enemies, in the course of the fight…" "Exactly. And when you throw in the fact that he's extremely impulsive, you get the ingredients for a lot of bad situations. I think he lumps all of humanity together, though he only shows it if he gets too pressured."

"Speaking of which--would you say that he's human?"

"That's more of a biological or a philosophical question. Does he think he's human? Absolutely not. He's repeatedly made comments insinuating that or outright stating it."

"How smart is he?"

"A lot smarter than most people give him credit for. He may not do well on the SATs, but considering what his purpose is, he doesn't need to. He's very cunning. And he's been getting in fights on a routine basis for, what, something like ten years, so he's a pretty experienced combatant."

"There are some reports of him being heroic…"

"He has a huge persecution complex--and when he sees people being victimized by other people, he wants to step in."

"That kind of explains why his behavior has gotten more extreme, as he's gone along…if you constantly give a person with paranoid tendencies a reason to be paranoid, they're just gonna get worse. Since everyone is after him, his complex keeps getting justified. But we can't just let him run wild, either."

"Believe me, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes. This is like the Middle East--straight-out fighting won't be enough to solve the problem. You could trade punches with the Hulk for decades without making any progress."

"Well, that's pretty much what's happened, so far. We attack him, he attacks us, and it never ends."

"You have to be smart about it. Conventional warfare may give you some short-term solutions, but nothing long-term."

The phone rang, and McGregory picked it up. "Yeah? Oh, did they? Good. Was she--okay. No, it doesn't sound like it. Give her the standard interview and kick her loose." He put it back in its cradle.

"Was that about Nevada?"

"Yeah, our missing witness showed up. She's one of your colleagues, apparently--a Dr. Del Rio?"

"Hey, I've heard of her. Her family is really big back in Boston. She's done some consulting for the FBI."

"She was in the diner when it all went down. After that, she ran for the desert."

"Smart lady."

"They still haven't found anything down there. We sent some sweep teams--investigators, forensic people, tech-scavengers, aerial and plainclothes surveillance--but, nothing. I'd have gone down there myself, except I had a ton of video conferences with other agencies."

"Because AIM was involved?"

"Yeah, whenever we have terrorists in the mix, we have to notify the FBI, SHIELD, CTU, Checkmate, Homeland Security…"

"So, are you filling any other positions? Some of Ross' old favorites have left for greener pastures, right?"

"I managed to beg the Joint Chiefs into giving us a few more million, so we can go top of the line, in terms of personnel."

"And you hired me? I think I just felt my self-esteem kick up a few notches."

"Money can't get everyone we want, though--the top expert in one very relevant field isn't exactly available."

"Dr. Bruce Banner and gamma radiation."

"Exactly. So, we're stuck with Sebastian."

"…please tell me you're kidding."

"I wish I was."