Free Big Superhero Action by Raymond Embrack Page B

positive association with OSD. Make him head of Homodevious Operations.”
    “We seduce him by putting him on the map,” Dr. Playground decided. “We up his stock. Put the footage out. Debut him as the next superhero.”
    “He needs a name.”
    “Any ideas?”
    “Well…since he’s still in the picture…and he’s in a picture… his name is The Kid in the Picture. How’s that?”
    “You have a way with names. That’s our Hitler.”
    “Done.”
    “The boy is so exquisitely beautiful I don’t know whether to pimp him, recruit him, or kill him. Not that it has to be multiple choice. He’s hot enough for Dr. Playground. But a little old.”

18
    O nce a month Xoir liked to awake nude with a holosynthetic Salvador Dali painting her.
    “Lightly,” she said, parting her thighs. “Like a dove.”
    Dali put down his brush and his mustaches lowered between her thighs. The holosynth would be faded out by the time she got out of bed. She designed them to her need for power affirmation, queued at random. She could awake to Pablo Picasso up all night painting her while she was asleep. She could awake inside a closed set where the bloated middle aged Orson Welles was filming her sleep. She could awake beside a nude Sylvia Plath rescued from suicide by her sexual magnetism.
    She got out of bed, crossed the floor-to-ceiling view of downtown Brutalia, went to the bathroom suite. Two hours later she was dressed and headed to her office suite one floor above her home suite.
    The nerve center of her office suite was surrounded by 15 screens. Her software-accurate videotape-like memory storage and retrieval capability had been better than having 15 screens, her superior autobiographical memory recording every moment of her life from an inexact point in utero during the third trimester. She had kept zero records, zero files. Her brain had the storage capacity of a PC. Until the year 2000. Every memory to that year had been encrypted from retrieval. Her response was her invention of neuropedic science, her invention of the neuropedix to unencrypt her pre-2000 memory banks. It was an ongoing project that could take the rest of her life to complete. If the memory was gone, the super scientist skill set remained only now it was like practicing unlearned magic.
    Her other role was as Dr. Playground’s analyst. Her specialty was superheroes. After superheroes there was no going back to the ordinary patient. For their sessions he wore no exoframe. The psyche of Simon Stranko was equally psychiatry and archeology. He appreciated the irony of the patient-on-the-couch cliché applied to a supervillain. What had been determined about him so far: he was neither pedophiliac nor homosexual. But he had a strong attraction to acquiring the orientation of pedophilia. Mentally she reviewed the later part of their last session.
    “I need to be something don’t I?” he said in his corrupt sense of playfulness. “At least allow me to talk like a pedophile. You should have made me one by now.”
    “Rebuilding your sexuality takes time.”
    “It takes strength to be a pedophile. If I had to be something, I would pick that. So I picked that. My psyche is waiting. Let’s go.”
    “Again, science can’t change your sexuality until it has been located.”
    “Are you closer to extracting the programming?”
    “Your psyche is still too protected.”
    “
So how do you know I’m not actually a pedophile?”
    “The statistical odds are against it.”
    “My fault. I’m thinking it might be fun to beat-off once in a while. A guy likes to know whether he’s hetero or homo, kind of get the nuances of his wetness.”
    “That part of your psyche is missing. Yet you are capable of missing what you don’t know. Interesting.”
    “Glad to be fucking interesting to you. Any new information drilled from this fucking well in my brain? Give me a drop of oil to lube with. Something.”
    “I can give you stronger erotropics,” Xoir said. “But have no