#4: The Underground Pt. 4: "Changes"

I ain't human anymore. I'm more than aware of that £$%^. What I am is a sophisticated computer program-- the personality of a hitman in the body of a state-of-the-art cyborg construct. This means a few things for my life. It means I never age. I'm perpetually stuck in my mid-thirties, looking like I was made out of anger instead o'flesh, when instead it ain't even flesh, it's a highly durable regenerative intelligent plastic, allowing me to grow an indestructible beard if needs must. Another fun fact: I can take a punch like nobodies business. I'm made of metal-- Metallo, to be precise-- a metal that is radiation proof, highly durable, and doesn't melt under, let's say, the heat generated by a blast from the eyes of the so-called Man o' Steel. My body is powered by a power cell that draws power from the chunks of alien ore in my chest, and with the power output they provide, it means I'll never shut down I'll never stop. I'll never falter. If I gots something to do, I'll £$%^ing do it, and you ain't gonna' stop me.

My name is John Corben. And right now, I'm on the prowl.

[/i]
Part Four (of Six): "Changes"
Written by House Of Mystery
Cover by Joe Jarin
Edited by Kevin Feeney[/center]

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Lex Luthor rebuilt me. Better. Faster. Stronger. He made me a regular Steve Austin, and I'm grateful for that-- even if he was under the apparent thrall of The Voice. Y'gotta understand, I ain't ever been the smartest sonofabitch, but I know that in the coming weeks-- months at the most-- that a £$%^storm is gonna rain down on the big boss man. If there's one thing I know being a Metropolis-based super£$%^, is that you never mess with Luthor. He's a hardcore mother$%^&er, dangerous for an egghead, and he knows his way around nearly all the technology in the world-- mainly 'cause he had a hand in their original creation. He knew the way around my exo-skeleton. Enough to download my memories from my old, crappy shell and upload them into a new one.

I was in Hub City. Hell of a town. The bar had just reopened after the HCPD had finished their preliminary investigation. Any other city, the joint would stay shut for as long as it took, but hey, the barkeep greased the right, dirty palms, and he was back open, pale as a ghost, shaking as he poured the pints, but open none-the-less.

"Rough night?" I asked, sipping my glass of whiskey.

Alcohol doesn't taste of anything right now. I can shut off systems in my new body, I discovered-- I can not feel pain. I can choose to turn off the receptors, and just let loose. I want to digress for a moment. Back when I first realised my 'predicament', the fact that I was no longer part of humanity, but maybe part of... some kind of Homo Mechanicus... it was like being in a sensory deprivation tank. I couldn't feel my hands, or the blood pumping through my veins. Being human, you take that for granted, the innocuous throb of warmth being moved through your veins. I went insane for a while. Fixated on Superman, because, to be honest, it was his irradiated home world in my chest, powering me, keeping me alive. I wanted him to kill me. Until Luthor found me, and fixed my systems. He made me feel. Go figure. I laid low until I was found.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," replied the bartender. My eyes-- enhanced as they were-- noted the rise in body temperature, the way his jowl shuddered under the pressure of what he was thinking.

"Try me. Saw the cops earlier. Had yourself a bit of a murder?"

The bartender gagged. I caught him unawares with my words. "I... uhh..."

I finish off the whiskey, activating my taste receptors, and relishing the toxic sting as it swirled into my stomach. "I need a description, boss. I need to know who did this. I need a face"

"W-who are you?"

"Metallo." I bring my hand up, straight into his face, and my skin peels back, revealing a glowing green shard of Kryptonite. "This'll hurt."



The laptop was sat in front of Ravager, who refused to sit down when Mr Blink suggested it to him. "I'll stand," he intoned, the unblinking eyes of his mask staring at the laptop that Blink opened up before him.

The Voice's disguised face flickered onto the screen, and began to speak in the same, detached, monosyllabic voice as he had before. <You have done well, Ravager. Your infiltration of Kobra's restructuring allowed us an intimate glimpse into the reformation of a very dangerous group.>

"You sound like a protagonist, Voice. Ain't very cool."

<On the contrary, I believe Kobra to be a threat to the Secret Society I have formed, and would want to know if they believe us to be a threat as well.>

The Ravager flexed his fingers, the servos in his armour moving with them. "Whatever. I'll do what you ask of me. What next?"

<You are a mystery to us, Ravager. You do not remove your armour. You killed the Guardian without provocation. 'Cape-killing', as I have heard it so aptly called, is usually reserved for grudges. I was not aware you held a grudge against James Harper.>

"Like you said," started the masked villain, his voice suddenly changing to match that of the Voice's, "You are a mystery to us, Ravager. I wasn't aware that was a problem."

"Yeah, for some of us, it isn't," Deathstroke entered the room, flanked by Catman and Toyman, who was in deep conversation with Major Disaster, who followed the others closely. "I see you got the laptop treatment."

"What do you mean, Deathstroke?" said Ravager, as he glanced down to the screen and saw that it was now blank, and Mr Blink was hurriedly collecting it.

"Mr Wilson is bringing up the fact that we are spoken to by The Voice in different ways, some of us by laptop, others by... some might suggest supernatural means," replied Toyman, turning away from Major Disaster, his limbs click-clattering about.

Catman said nothing, but sniffed Mr Blink as he nervously walked out of the room."Hhn."

"What's going on?" asked Ravager, as he looked around at the men assembled.

"We've got a new mission. Seems like we're The Voice's crack team, doing what needs to be done when it needs doing damn well," Deathstroke laughed, "just like the old days."

"I'm sure. What's the new mission?"

"We're headed out the city, over to Midway. They've got some heavy-duty tech out there that The Voice wants his hands on. Some kind of alien hard drive, containing star-maps, dimensional coordinates, that kind of £$%^. We need to do a bit of breaking-and-entering."

"Why is it going to take all of us?" asked Major Disaster, "I'm sure Ravager could handle it all by his lonesome--" he looked over to the large, armour clad individual, "nice work on the Kobra sting, by the way."

"Thank you."

"Capes," said Deathstroke. "There are rumours of Capes being on site."

"Trap?" offered Catman, as he leaned forward off the wall he was resting against.

Deathstroke shook his head. "If I thought it was, I wouldn't take us in. It's regular procedure, now that the Justice League is amping up it's presence in the world. I've been looking over their public appearances. I see a pattern, one I intend to exploit before they change it."

"Military precision, eh?"

Slade Wilson laughed quietly. "Exactly. Now let's go find that French bastard Warp, and get us Midway side."



The bartender talked. Well, as much as he could, as he contended with the heavy duty radiation burns I was inflicting upon his face. Lex Luthor's upgrades have done something to my operating systems-- weapon upgrades, I think. I'm tempted to switch my brain to full cyborg processing mode, get the complete low-down on my new software, but I've only done it once before, and it was like... losing a piece of myself. As such, I'll survive on the HUD my eyes offers. Green Kryptonite radiation is £$%^ing deadly to Superman, but it's still a radioactive isotope, and with the amplification gear I've had installed? Deadly to humans as well. I don't know what Red-K or Gold-K would do to a human, and I'm not gonna' bother trying, keep the fun stuff to myself, but maybe one day, when I'm bored.

Hammer and Sickle were beaten to £$%^ by a man in a black suit, with fine red trim and tie. He was well-spoken, generic looking, but with a sinister look in his eye and, I quote, 'mfffss, msfff, mmm!' Yeah. By the time he finished his sentence, he didn't have any lips left, and his tongue was a shrivelled black thing. Luckily I called the paramedics when I was done. Else he might not have survived.

Ha.

I kick him in the head, heavy metal connecting with soft human, knocking him out cold. Let him suffer in silence whilst I go about my work. I scan the area where the £$%^storm went down. CSU has been and gone, but they don't see nearly as much as I do. Microscopic flakes of skin are visible on the floor... I press my fingertip against the discarded cells, and check all known databases, public and private. "Huh." Whoever these belong to, and this is damn weird, isn't in any computer. Anywhere. That's impossible, we're all tagged and uploaded into the system when we're born, a given now that we live in a world where Big Brother is becoming a reality every day... so, for someone to not be on that database? Either someone is one hell of a hacker, or this bastard from The 100... ain't entirely supposed to be here.

"You are looking"

"for our leader"

"Mr Punch?"

I turn, and see a man and a woman, wearing the same get-up that the bartender described the attacker of the two Ruskies of having on. "Mr Punch? I love having the name of the man I'm gonna' kill." I stand back up, and brush down my trousers. I hear the bartender weep as he comes round. Something ain't right. "You must be from The 100?"

"Mr Ymir," said the man.

"and Ms Klaus," finished the woman.

"You are some freaky mother£$%^ers, you know that?" their voices were weird, and something was tingling, my internal sensors going into overdrive as a voice in the back of my head screamed for me to get out of there. But hey, I wasn't gonna' be scared away by some stupidly named gangsters, was I?

"John Corben"

"we mean you no offense"

"but your continuing existence"

"is a travesty."

The bar blew up with me inside. I don't know where they were hiding the explosives, or if they were the explosives, but the concussive blast sent me flying through five walls, and into the street behind. My damage control centers screamed at me-- epidermal layer compromised, apparently, and I knew what that meant as soon as I saw my face hanging off my skull. Except, I knew then, that it wasn't my face. And it wasn't my skull. It was £$%^ like this that made me lose my mind a bit every time. I was a robot. A monster. And now I couldn't pass as what I used to be. A voice began to whisper in the back of my head. Damage control, again, I guessed. I pushed the chunk of 'meat' that was the flesh-like plastic my face was made of against the cold metal of my skull, and I felt tiny strands of plastic zip into place, and wrench my features back into place. I had my face again, but my clothes were a mess, and I knew that the damage wasn't exclusive to my face.

I headed into the shadows whilst the chaos brought on by the explosion continued to roll out. I hated this world. I hated these people, so transfixed by the incident but not the person. I know it sounds stupid, it's not like I want to be seen, I'm a bloody mess (don't ask me why I can simulate bleeding, Luthor, I guess, in his infinite wisdom?), but the world is ablaze in the dark corners of Hub City, and yet people are intent to watch it burn on down.

These bastards deserve to die.

[/b]

"They say you have powers like mine," Tommy Lister smiled awkwardly as he sat in the main chamber of the Secret Society's headquarters. Rudy Jones was sat across from him, his breathing heavy and laboured. "Taking powers, stuff like that."

"Sure," said the Parasite, staring intently at the young boy. Tommy couldn't help but feel uncomfortable. Weak at the knees and with the feeling his dinner was going to pay them all a visit.

"So, why am I here? Are you going to, uh, train me?" Tommy wanted to get the Hell out of here. He wasn't a 'villain' through choice, more like he fell into the situation. When his meta-gene kicked in, his brother Danny's did too. They didn't know. They didn't talk about their dirty little shame. But Tommy hugged his brother one night, and Danny seized up. Tommy didn't know what was wrong, and withdrew, but he looked at his hands, and saw them glowing. Danny was having a seizure, his body was wilting away, and then he was just a husk, and suddenly Tommy could freeze things with a touch. Turns out, that whilst Tommy was a mimic, in his own, horrifying way, and Danny was a psychokinetic, but with a strange twist: the ability to manipulate and create ice-- but now Tommy was both, and not only that, a murderer to boot. He was locked up, called a monster, and so when the other monsters got wind of him, they liked his power, and broke him out on their next outing from the prison. he ended up here.

Sitting opposite a real monster.

The Voice's visage flickered onto the screen. <Hello Rudy. Hello Tommy. I am so glad you could make it.>

"I was eating," said the Parasite slowly, "she was delicious."

Tommy thought to laugh. He then thought the better of it. "Umm, glad to be here?"

<I'm sure.> said The Voice, letting it linger in the air before continuing. <Rudy Jones was exposed to a very specific group of minerals, and as such, was disfigured and acquired the ability to absorb powers. It is a temporary absorption, though, Tommy. He cannot hold onto those powers. So I have given him a few men and women, metahumans who did not agree with my policies, and let him feed. Recently, I gave him a shape changer. Is he still alive, Rudy?>

"Barely," replied Rudy.

<Tommy, you, on the other hand, can keep everything. You are a very dangerous being. I am fascinated by this. You could make quite the foe, if you used your powers efficiently. So far, you have not.>

"I'm not, I..." Tommy shook his head, "I don't want to be a bad guy, I don't, I'm only here because I got dragged along, because they were shooting escapees on sight, and I... I..."

<Do not worry, Tommy. I have the answers to all your problems. The salve for all your pain.>

"What?" said Tommy, breathlessly.

<I can reunite you with your brother.>

"What do you mean--?" Tommy looked over to the Parasite, who had climbed out of his chair, and stalking toward him. "No!" He threw his arm up, and encased Rudy in ice, freezing the villain in his tracks. "You can't--!"

"I ate an illusion caster before I got here, kid," Tommy spun around, and the Parasite grabbed him by the face, and began to feed. "I ate too fast. Was greedy. Didn't save any morsels for later." He reeled back, feasting, lapping up the power of Tommy Lister, "you froze a figment, kid, and now I got your power. Yours and mine, together, wonder what'll happen."

<An experiment. Becoming more. Good luck, Rudy.>

The Parasite's body began to pop and boil, his flesh running down his body. Tommy was past screaming now, but every now and then choked-- until he was a husk, and the Parasite was twitching on the floor. His flesh ran together in a pool, and then seemed to move over his body once more... covering him in a grayish shell that hardened around him. He was silent then... sleeping... growing...



Got bored of holding up in the shadows. I was left to my own devices to do this mission, and I didn't want to go crawling to The Voice just because I got blown to £$%^, so I instead murdered three people, and plugged myself into the city-wide surveillance cameras. I tracked a well-dressed, generic looking man walk from the bar, and a man and a woman-- Ymir and Klaus-- with two large duffel bags over their shoulders. They're carrying the corpses of two of the Soviet Union's greatest super soldiers. Over their shoulders. The cameras go blank for a while. We knew of this. I think I'm lucky, I got here before anyone else, means I get dibs on scalping the bastards-- or bastard, considering the happy go-lucky couple blew themselves up. I wipe the files. Go to the root of the database, and wipe it there too. Being a super-computer with the memory engrams of a hitman has it's perks. A few. A minor few. I track 'Mr Punch' to his base-of-operations, The Majestic-- the grandest hotel of all Hub, and I make sure I get away scot-free. I'm on the prowl. I'm going to kill this guy.

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I kill a guy that shares my height and build before I get there. He's dressed nice, too, which helps. I steal his clothes, remember my mother's tie-tying advice, and then I prepare myself. I'm gonna' have to play this nice and sneaky, need to make sure my mind isn't on it's default setting-- common thug-- and I shift into well-mannered bad-ass-- when I'm ready I enter the hotel, and am immediately struck by the fact that there are probably ninety-seven men and women all staring at me, their weapons raised, and Mr Punch is on the stairwell, smiling.

"Welcome to the party, Mr Corben."

"Mr Punch, I presume?" I don't know why I said that.

"You've followed the trail. Guess you're looking for me. And this." He throws a head at me, and I catch it with one hand. Hammer's head. I look at it, and throw it to one side. The ninety-seven men and women haven't budged. "I would have wrapped it up, all nice and pretty, but I didn't have the time.

"We warned you to stay out of this league. Stick to what you were good at, be a good little gangster, stick to Gotham. We wouldn't have touched you." This was true. But then again, I'm just reading from the manifesto, I can't say I believe that killing a guy is the best way to not ferment some kind of villain-war. Never mind.

"You killed Blackguard. That wasn't a warning," Mr Punch smiled, and I could see his hands tight around two attaché cases that he held in either hand. I couldn't get a good read on what was inside, though there was a strange heat signature emanating out... weirder and weirder.

"That"

"was"

"an"

"insult." The echoing chorus of the other members of The 100 rumbled throughout the room. Hive-mind, maybe? Connected to Mr Punch? It ain't my job to throw out suppositions...

"Spooky," I laughed. People don't seem to remember that I've faced Superman. Coulda killed him too, if it weren't for circumstances out of my control. I start unbuttoning my jacket, and then my white shirt. I say 'my', of course, but the blood stain on the back, where I ripped out a guy's spine, is a dead give-away that something ain't right. "Excuse me."

"No," said Mr Punch, as he clicked his fingers.

Hot lead tore into my body. I felt slices of metal slipping between the gaps in my body that weren't metal-- other bullets just hit reinforced Metallo, and went no further, but the onslaught of bullets was distracting, and not only that, deafening. I didn't stop unbuttoning my shirt until it was all the way off. The material-- 100% cotton?-- was torn to shreds by then, and my flesh was riddled with holes, but I didn't care. I grinned. "Now, where was I?"

My chest cavity opened up. The shard of green Kryptonite rotated to the forefront, and then a lens slipped down from my upper sternum. HUD display threw two words in ruby red before my eyes: Wide Beam. Mr Punch was gone by the time the crap-shoot ended. There were ninety-seven people in the room now, all changing their ammo. I wouldn't give them the opportunity to piss me off any more-- I clicked my own fingers, and then the beam exploded outwards, gutting my enemies. They were shorn in half, torsos flew up, legs fell down, as the lens magnified the radioactive payload of the Kryptonite and became a death-ray. Within seconds it was over. I hurried through killing field, shoes damp with blood and bile, soles creaking under shattered bone and melted gun metal, and ran out the back, but Mr Punch was long gone, along with his two attaché cases.

"Huh. Next time." I hate loose ends. Can't stand them. But my sensors can't pick up a trace-- almost like the bastard vanished into nowhere. Cogs begin to turn in my head. I think. It was easy. It was too easy to track him here. When he strung up Hammer and Sickle in Central Square, he blacked out the CCTV. How? I don't know. But I could track him here, easily, and then he sacrificed his men and women just to get out? "No," I mumble, as I begin to run a scenario in my head. I was tricked. I bloodied up a hotel righteously, and now-- I hear sirens. He wouldn't, would I? I was set up. I killed ninety-seven people, ninety nine if you count the two who blew themselves up, a hundred and four if you count the collateral damage I ratcheted up during my investigation. £$%^! I made myself a target!

<You need to be more careful,> the voice in the back of my head whispers. <You are lucky I watch out for those in the world that I have invested time in. You are untraceable, Mr Corben. Your body is emitting a frequency jammer-- capable of creating a blind spot in any surveillance equipment. You cannot be recorded without your knowledge. Keep that in mind. And come home.>

My sensors roar into overdrive, and I turn to see Warp climb out of a hole in reality, and looked around until he finds me. "Eh?" His smile makes me sicken. When did I become such a misanthrope? "I am ere to collect you, Monsieur Corben. May we, ow you say, urry up? I do not want to be ere when ze police arrive."

"Let's go."

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Warp and Metallo arrived instantaneously. There was no one around to welcome them. "Where is everybody?" asked Corben, his sensors dragging data off the walls as he carefully looked around.

"I do not know," replied Warp, "I ad just transported Deathstroke and eez team to Midway City... I wonder..."

<The team I sent to Midway City encountered a problem. As such we are moving operations for the time being.>

Metallo turned and saw The Voice's face projected from nowhere against the wall. "'Problem'? What kind of problem?"

<A cape problem. Warp, I suggest you remove yourself and Metallo to our secondary location.>

"Oui," said Warp, taking Metallo by the shoulder. "Au revoir."

[/b]

"Who is he?"

"John Doe. I hate $%^& like this." The nurse wheeled the vegetative man into the hospital, chatting away with the other nurse. "Nobody knows. Abandoned, they think, 'cause it got too hard to look after him. I know I'm gonna hate changing his man-diapers. Hey, who are you?"

A group of garishly clad men and women stood in front of the nurses. "Friends of your patient." Black Spider punched the woman in the mouth, and she fell down hard. Volcana superheated the air around the other nurse, causing her to pass out.

Clock King kneeled in front of the patient, and shook his head. "Peace. They offered us peace, and yet continue to play their games."

"He doesn't look too good, Temple," said Crime-Smith, as he pointed to a surveillance camera, and disabled it with a click of a button. "What did they do to him?"

"I'm not detecting the radiation signature that comes with his powers-- the Zeta Beam energy is no longer in his system, but not only that... my God, it's like they're lobotomised him." Clock King shook his head. "It'll be alright, Ira, we'll fix this." He took a small device from his pocket, and looked it up and down. "You prepared this as a contingency, in case something like this every happened. You told me it would hurt. But I'm thinking, old friend, that any hurt you feel now, you'll want to project a thousand fold on those Secret Society traitors."

Clock King jammed the device into the comatose IQ's skull, and he let out a soft moan as it began to throb. As the throbbing got louder, the moaning became clearer as Ira Quimby began to scream, until finally, he tore the device off his head, and lurched out of the wheelchair. "Those... lying... bastards!" He looked to the members of Injustice, Unlimited. assembled. "I need pants. And 24 hours in my lab, with the sun lamps on full beam. I'm going to tan up and then we're going to war. This time, they die." He paused for a moment. "Get me pants."

"You should be lucky we found you."

"Where are we, anyway?" asked Ira, as he looked around.

The Crime-Smith grinned. "Wessex. England. They tried to hide you. But they seem to forget that we're geniuses."

"Then let us be on our way," said Quimby, as he was flanked by the other members of his group. "Back home. And to war."