This sudden burst of altruism, saving the Martian rover, unexpectedly attracted more attention to my fake superhero persona than all my previous, more classic actions.
Which, I guess, makes some sense.
People see heroes fighting villains or helping with disaster aftermath every day.
But something like this had never happened before.
And a lot of people saw me.
I wasn’t the only one who’d been closely following the rover’s misadventures for the past month.
And I wasn’t the only one filming the rescue.
The scientists didn’t keep quiet about what happened.
In fact, they published images transmitted back to Earth by the rover itself.
Those images showed enough elements of my costume to identify me as a presumably Russian rookie superhero.
And the fact that I’d had my own camera and filmed everything didn’t escape NASA’s notice either.
The very next week, on their official social media accounts, NASA posted an appeal to the mysterious stranger.
They offered to buy my recordings for a pretty decent sum, to discuss possible future cooperation, and of course, they promised a reward for the help I’d already given to scientific progress.
I just had to contact them through the link in the post.
A very strange but pleasant feeling: reading an official appeal from a leading scientific organization, personally addressed to you, an anonymous person.
Such official appeals from a single, anonymous person are usually directed at criminal terrorists making demands, like the Unabomber, though he initiated the negotiations with the FBI.
Of course, I couldn’t resist such an offer.
I’d already been a cosmonaut, now I could be an astronaut too.
I improved my costume a bit.
On Stedman’s advice, I added lenses to my mask to hide my eyes, and a Faraday mesh under the top layer of material to prevent anyone from seeing under the fabric with various scanning equipment.
Oxana Fyodorovna had no problem upgrading one of my costumes for the new needs.
Then I wrote to the address left in the post with the appeal.
There was a slight hitch.
In the time I’d taken to think and prepare to respond, hundreds, if not thousands, of people had written to that address, trying to claim someone else’s reward, along with plenty of just fools.
But a short video clip from space that I attached to my message easily solved that problem.
After that, the NASA admins, forced to deal with the flood of idiots and gold diggers, could breathe a sigh of relief.
And I went to an offline meeting with the scientists in Washington.
Surprisingly, everything went quietly, smoothly, and without any setups, just as I’d demanded in my correspondence.
No press, no cameras, no publicity.
Everything happened at NASA headquarters in DC.
I was checked and led into an almost empty hall where only five people were waiting.
Some important manager, more a measure of his self-importance than his position, who’d been assigned to negotiate with me.
Three scientists.
And a shady, gray-haired old man with a scar near his lip, whom everyone else carefully ignored most of the time.
The important manager handed me a medal, which he tried to pin to my costume, but failed.
Spider silk, predictably, was too strong.
So he had to just hand it to me.
Along with the medal came a bank card with fifty thousand dollars.
Not bad, considering that on one dive to the bottom, I could earn more.
When I gave the scientists copies of my flight video, that sum increased by another twenty thousand.
Then we discussed the possibility of further cooperation.
Everything was pretty clear.
Why spend millions of dollars and years of work delivering cargo to space on incredibly expensive and complex rockets when there’s a guy who can do it in an hour for a hundred times less?
It’s surprising no one thought of hiring supers for such work before.
Though there aren’t many of us who can independently go into space, let alone fly to another planet.
Besides me and my father, the Immortal could do the first, for example, but he needs a supply of air and food.
And I haven’t heard of him ever flying farther than low Earth orbit in his long life.
In theory, Eve could go into space, but she’s limited by her own endurance and, again, by her air supply, not to mention her relatively low flight speed compared to me.
And those were exactly the offers I got from the scientists, who turned out to be heads of research projects related to those planets.
They clearly expected to hear about timelines and requirements, but I just agreed, only warning them to pack their packages securely and give me thorough instructions for unpacking on site and so on.
Which, really, was obvious anyway.
Another half hour later, after discussing the details, I left NASA headquarters in the company of Stedman, who’d been that shady guy everyone was looking at.
***
We stopped at the main entrance, attracting the attention of passing space agency employees.
I was in costume, and almost anyone who followed space missions at all, let alone worked at NASA, would now recognize this costume at first glance.
“My congratulations,” Cecil said, half mockingly, half proudly, as we stepped outside.
“You’re practically working for the government now, Invincible.”
During the details discussion, the manager had also asked what they should call me in official sources.
So I decided to use this opportunity to get rid of those ridiculous, cliché nicknames the Americans had come up with for me.
“They don’t even know who I am under the mask,” unless you gave away my secret.
“And our agreements are purely business.”
“Like ours.”
“Still holding a grudge?” I glanced at the outwardly impassive old man.
Initially, Cecil hadn’t approved of me first getting caught on the rover’s camera and then contacting NASA.
And he seemed a bit annoyed that I’d refused to visit his Pentagon base but had accepted an invitation to go there without a second thought.
“I’m not the age to hold grudges, especially against young people like you.
I just want you to understand that not everyone in my agency is like Erickson.”
Yes, he’d chalked up my distrust of his agency to my impression of meeting Erickson, who’d tainted the whole Agency in Eve’s and my eyes.
And I wasn’t in a hurry to disabuse the old man of his misconceptions.
“By the way,” I pulled the recently received card from my pocket.
“I’ll be de-anonymized as soon as I use this, right?”
“I’ve made sure that won’t happen,” he said, and I detected a hint of reproach.
“No one will track this card or the transactions on it.
Just make sure your parents don’t catch it.”
Well, considering that my secret identity has been in Stedman’s hands since birth, thanks to Nolan, there’s no point in pretending anymore.
I’ll have to trust the old man.
If you think about it, refusing a tour of the Pentagon headquarters didn’t make much sense either, except to create the image of a young maximalist holding a grudge and distrusting the government.
Because if Cecil wants to leak my secret, he will.
If not, he won’t let anyone unnecessary be there at the time.
“Fine,” I said reluctantly.
“You wanted to show me your headquarters, didn’t you?”
***
Underwater footage, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy to place.
I had enough for a whole film.
First, I tried to send the material I’d filmed during my dives to Animal Planet and National Geographic Wild, completely free of charge.
I just got a polite refusal.
The TV channel representatives, despite the high quality of the footage, expressed doubts about its authenticity and said they couldn’t afford to use unverified material from a dubious source.
I could understand them.
I’d written to them from a “left” email address I’d just created.
And the creatures that appeared in the footage were quite different from the marine biologists’ ideas about the fauna at such depths.
That’s when I started thinking.
Why was I so fixated on television?
Many more people are now on YouTube, and educational channels enjoy some, not as crazy as the trending crap, but still, popularity.
In my past life, before I applied to the volunteer program, I dreamed of space mostly through the internet, including YouTube.
It was the trigger that made me seriously get into the topic.
Easier said than done.
I went even further. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Instead of giving my footage to someone else, I created my own channel and started uploading completely exclusive content from one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.
Of course, there were plenty of characters in this world who could repeat my dive, but none of them were interested in doing so.
It seems no scientist working in this field had ever gained such powers.
Although there was one.
Not a scientist, but a superhero doing similar work.
My father.
I’d essentially come to the same thing Nolan does for a living.
He describes his travels in books, in a semi-fictional format.
I’d gone further, in a way simplifying the material, replacing books with videos, and in a way improving it, shifting the setting from the boring jungles, mountains, and deserts to truly inaccessible places for most people.
So I got another hobby, besides my occasional assignments from NASA and my own superhero outings.
Fortunately, cooperating with Stedman allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse and always know where Omni-Man was, so I wouldn’t cross paths with him.
And Mom’s supervision of my absences was getting less and less strict as I grew older in her eyes.
It took me about a month to register the channel, edit a few of the first videos about sea monsters, and upload them online.
All of this was done, naturally, in secret from my parents.
But with Eve’s help.
She even got excited about the idea of trying to fly beyond the planet’s atmosphere herself after watching my flight to Mars video.
So not only did I become one of those child bloggers, but I also dragged my friend into it.
Fortunately, she hadn’t yet thought of making her own channel and filming the “surprises” she made herself.
Though she was probably too old for that now.
Her many younger brothers and sisters, on the other hand, were perfect for it.
Yes, the atomic family.
Those little monsters, this time in the classic, childish sense of the word, had now become an important part of Eve’s life.
And mine too.
Number Two, who’d taken the new name Ted, had been going to our school for a month now.
And surprisingly, he hadn’t yet been involved in any fights, brawls, or mystical incidents.
The younger ones were studying with private tutors assigned by Stedman and, through gritted teeth, catching up on what they’d missed.
And as a reward for good grades, Eve occasionally took them on her, and sometimes I was there too, superhero outings.
That’s what really got all the younger Brandyworts fired up, except maybe Ted.
He was a bit more independent.
Given the chance, they’d have already formed their own atomic gang and gone off to do good and cause justice.
Though it wasn’t so much about altruism or a conscious desire to use their powers for good.
It was just cool in the eyes of children.
They wanted to be like their idols.
And it didn’t hurt that the ones who’d rescued them from despair were superheroes: Eve, me, and Red Rush and Darkwing, who’d shown up at the end.
Elias Brandywort himself, the newly minted single father of many children, as I’d suspected, was back working at the Pentagon.
I even visited him there during my tour.
However, I was wrong about one thing.
His work wasn’t about trying to create more sisters and brothers for Eve.
Instead, he was looking for ways to restore Eve’s full power.
I didn’t understand all the theories and terminology, that was probably intentional, but the gist was that in the past he’d deliberately made sure Eve’s powers were well and truly blocked so that no one could remove the limiter.
And now, even for him, it wasn’t easy to break or weaken that limiter.
But he had plenty of motivation.
Eve was the only one who could give his beloved a chance at a normal life.
Yes, I saw her mother, the former test subject and Brandywort’s lover.
It was a nightmare.
If I hadn’t written to Red Rush that day, but just barged in here with Erickson and Eve, I’d have personally killed the bastard and everyone responsible for what they’d done to that woman.
Still, Elias was quite optimistic about his work.
We’ll see what comes of it.